Thursday, May 08, 2014

What is Johnny Shaw reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Johnny Shaw, author of Plaster City.

His entry begins:
With a few exceptions, I’ve been focused on crime fiction for the last few months. It’s always been my pleasure reading, so I tend to default to that quadrant of the to-be-read stacks when I’m looking for a book. I’ve read a lot of great books recently and would encourage people to seek these out.

The Little Boy Inside and Other Stories by Glenn Gray - One of the best short story collections I’ve read in a long time. Strange, compelling, and incredibly unique, Gray’s idiosyncratic stories of bodybuilders, scut monkeys, and strange happenings stuck with me for a long time after...[read on]
About Plaster City, from the publisher:
Jimmy Veeder and Bobby Maves are back at it, two years after the events of Dove Season—they’re not exactly the luckiest guys in the Imperial Valley, but, hey, they win more fights than they lose.

Settled on his own farmland and living like a true family man after years of irresponsible fun, Jimmy’s got a straight life cut out for him. But he’s knocking years off that life thanks to fun-yet-dangerous Bobby’s booze-addled antics—especially now that Bobby is single, volatile as ever, and bored as hell.

When Bobby’s teenage daughter goes missing, he and Jimmy take off on a misadventure that starts out as merely unfortunate and escalates to downright calamitous. Bobby won’t hesitate to kick a hornets’ nest to get the girl to safety, but when the rescue mission goes riotously sideways, the duo’s grit—and loyalty to each other—is put to the test.
Visit Johnny Shaw's website.

Writers Read: Johnny Shaw.

--Marshal Zeringue