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Well-known member
He's something of a hidden monument of American letters. A writer toiling away on colossal manuscripts across a range of styles and subjects, risking life and limb around the world, and curiously underappreciated - or at least rarely remarked upon.
He still gets the odd essay printed in Harper's and some of his books find publishers, but he feels like someone who may have been a giant in another era. I know he had a moment in the 90s, but his eccentricities and the scale of his project alone seem worthy of attention. We're talking about a bloke who made a tit of himself in Afghanistan with the Mujahedin, spent twenty years writing a 3,000 page study of violence, was profiled by the FBI as an Unabomber suspect, won the National Book Award for Fiction, briefly lived as a train-hopping hobo, visited the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and plenty of other things.
I've read his debut, You Bright and Risen Angels, a bunch of his essays, and I'm part way through the reader Larry McCaffery co-edited, Expelled from Eden, and there's been something interesting in all of them. There's also something completely repulsive about him which I don't think I've experienced with any other writer. I can hear his weird, nerdy voice in my head when reading some of it. Just a really bizarre, singular kind of figure.
He still gets the odd essay printed in Harper's and some of his books find publishers, but he feels like someone who may have been a giant in another era. I know he had a moment in the 90s, but his eccentricities and the scale of his project alone seem worthy of attention. We're talking about a bloke who made a tit of himself in Afghanistan with the Mujahedin, spent twenty years writing a 3,000 page study of violence, was profiled by the FBI as an Unabomber suspect, won the National Book Award for Fiction, briefly lived as a train-hopping hobo, visited the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and plenty of other things.
I've read his debut, You Bright and Risen Angels, a bunch of his essays, and I'm part way through the reader Larry McCaffery co-edited, Expelled from Eden, and there's been something interesting in all of them. There's also something completely repulsive about him which I don't think I've experienced with any other writer. I can hear his weird, nerdy voice in my head when reading some of it. Just a really bizarre, singular kind of figure.
