His entry begins:I’m currently reading Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle, although I’m reading it more slowly than I’d like because I’ve been so busy lately. It’s a uniquely grown-up biography in that it’s not about the hero-worship of childhood or the disenchantment that comes in adolescence when you first realize that your heroes are flawed. Instead, Leavy’s book presents the man in full, as both hero and human. The Last Boy also shows how profoundly satisfying it can be to read researched, long-form writing: her retelling of the first tape measure home run is a great human story and it’s just one small part of the book. Blogs and tweets and status updates can do a lot of wonderful things but they...[read on]Among the early praise for Merit Badges:
"Impressive vitality, droll wit, and affecting nostalgia. Eminently readable."Kevin Fenton lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota and works as an advertising writer and creative director. His fiction has appeared in the Northwest Review, the Laurel Review, and the Emprise Review. His writing on graphic design has been anthologized in Looking Closer 2 and Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue.
--Publishers Weekly“A beautifully crafted, perceptive and often funny evocation of some extraordinary, ordinary people.”
––Shelf Awareness, Robert Gray’s Top 10 for 2010 (Bookseller Recommendations)
" ... reminds us of Simone Weil's understanding that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
--from Jim Shepard’s judge’s comments for the AWP Award for the Novel
"... hilarious, painful, lovely, nostalgic, generous and true."
--Julie Schumacher, author of The Body is Water
"Kevin Fenton’s Minnisapa is a place to rival any in fiction..."
--Amy Shearn, author of How Far Is The Ocean from Here
Learn more about the book and author at the Merit Badges website and Kevin Fenton's blog.
The Page 69 Test: Merit Badges.
Writers Read: Kevin Fenton.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
