Monday, May 23, 2011

What is Patrick deWitt reading?

Today's featured contributor at Writers Read: Patrick deWitt, author of Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers.

His entry begins:
I’m reading a few different things right now. First up is Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. I’ve started working on a new novel that takes place partly in Manhattan, and while I’m familiar with the town, I’m not intimate with it, and I thought reading MT might knock something loose for me. It hasn’t yet, but I’m enjoying the read very much. It’s a hands on kind of story -- tactile and vividly descriptive.

Next is...[read on]
Among the early praise for The Sisters Brothers:
“DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.”
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The Sisters Brothers revisits the Old West with a darkly comic, distinctly contemporary sensibility. Patrick deWitt's narrator –a hired killer with a bad conscience and a melancholy disposition– is a brilliant and memorable creation."
--Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children

"If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick deWitt's bloody, darkly funny western The Sisters Brothers... It's smooth and seamless, shot through with dark humor, pared and antique without being Baroque... There is something very human in all this blood and guts... This humanness, with the humanness that Eli is growing into, give the novel a warmth and depth... DeWitt has shifted here radically, successfully... a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages."
--Los Angeles Times

“Thrilling…a lushly voiced picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry.”
--Esquire
Learn more about the book and author at Patrick deWitt's website.

Writers Read: Patrick deWitt.

--Marshal Zeringue