Thursday, September 12, 2013

What is Ben Dolnick reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Ben Dolnick, author of At the Bottom of Everything.

His entry begins:
I just finished John Williams' Stoner, whose beginning I loved, but which then kind of fizzled out for me. At first I was hoping it was going to be a quietly devastating book a la Mrs. Bridge, by Evan Connell -- one of the best books I've read in years -- but it turned out, for me anyway, to just be quietly quiet. Now I've just picked up Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty. I'd read a few of his books years ago, and been impressed without quite falling in love. Now, prompted by all the obits, I found myself wanting to give him another try, and so far...[read on]
About At the Bottom of Everything, from the publisher:
A stunning novel of friendship, guilt, and madness: two friends, torn apart by a terrible secret, and the dark adventure that neither of them could have ever conceived.

It’s been ten years since the “incident,” and Adam has long since decided he’s better off without his former best friend, Thomas. Adam is working as a tutor, sleeping with the mother of a student, spending lonely nights looking up his ex-girlfriend on Facebook, and pretending that he has some more meaningful plan for an adult life. But when he receives an email from Thomas’s mother begging for his help, he finds himself drawn back into his old friend’s world, and into the past he’s tried so desperately to forget. As Adam embarks upon a magnificently strange and unlikely journey, Ben Dolnick unspools a tale of spiritual reckoning, of search and escape, of longing and reaching for redemption—a tale of near hallucinatory power.
Learn more about the book and author at Ben Dolnick's website.

Dolnick's other novels are Zoology and You Know Who You Are.

The Page 69 Test: Zoology.

The Page 69 Test: You Know Who You Are.

Writers Read: Ben Dolnick (March 2011).

Writers Read: Ben Dolnick.

--Marshal Zeringue