What is Andrew Hudgins reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Andrew Hudgins, author of The Joker: A Memoir.

His entry begins:

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy, by Park Honan.

Honan gives us complex portrait of a complex poet who made his living as a playwright and as a government spy. Marlowe’s recruitment into the secret service at Cambridge, his botched missions in Europe, and his abandonment by the agency after his patron dies, and his death in a ambiguous scuffle that may have been an assassination, sounds just like the plot of a John le Carré thriller. But Honan is careful to present Marlowe as a poet and playwright as much as an intriguer, and he traces the poet’s development and his...[read on]

About The Joker, from the publisher:

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself—what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly—religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This book is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

Learn more about The Joker, and follow Andrew Hudgins on Facebook.

Writers Read: Andrew Hudgins (March 2009).

Writers Read: Andrew Hudgins.

--Marshal Zeringue