Reading and being haunted by this at the moment.

What line is that, st?

I'll look it up when you're done.

Jesus' Son is a brilliant collection, that's most people's starting point. Train Dreams is a quick and beautiful read though maybe a little slow. I know multiple people who have put down Tree of Smoke so probably don't start there.

Jesus' Son is a brilliant collection, that's most people's starting point. Train Dreams is a quick and beautiful read though maybe a little slow. I know multiple people who have put down Tree of Smoke so probably don't start there.

Some years earlier, in the mid-1950s, Grainier had paid ten cents to view the World's Fattest Man, who rested on a divan in a trailer that took him from town to town. To get the World's Fattest Man onto this divan they'd had to take the trailer's roof off and lower him down with a crane. He weighed in at just over a thousand pounds. There he sat, immense and dripping sweat, with a mustache and goatee and one gold earring like a pirate's, wearing shiny gold short pants and nothing else, his flesh rolling out on either side of him from one end of the divan to the other and spilling over and dangling toward the floor like an arrested waterfall, while out of this big pile of himself poked his head and arms and legs. People waited in line to stand at the open doorway and look in. He told each one to buy a picture of him from a stack by the window there for a dime.

Later in his long life Grainier confused the chronology of the past and felt certain that the day he'd viewed The World's Fattest Man-that evening-was the very same day he stood on Fourth Street in Troy, Montana, twenty-six miles east of the bridge, and looked at a railway car carrying the strange young hillbilly entertainer Elvis Presley. Presley's private train had stopped for some reason, maybe for repairs, here in this little town that didn't even merit its own station. The famous youth had appeared in a window briefly and raised his hand in greeting, but Grainier had come out of the
barbershop across the street too late to see this. He'd only had it told to him by the townspeople standing in the late dusk, strung along the street beside the deep bass of the idling diesel, speaking very low if speaking at all, staring into the mystery and grandeur of a boy so high and solitary.

Grainier had also once seen a wonder horse, and a wolf-boy, and he'd flown in the air in a biplane in 1927. He'd started his life story on a train ride he couldn't remember, and ended up standing around outside a train with Elvis Presley in it.

Have any of you read any Richard Price novels?

No, but I've heard Lush Life is good. The guys on The Watch podcast love him. Great TV writer, too.

my writer's group

Hey, everybody, Joey lives in New York City!

I'm told It's really loved his stuff.

Hey, everybody, Joey lives in New York City!

Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell