http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:18:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en . . . is an incident involving a couple of boys and the garden next door to my house. It must have been around 1960. These days, the neighborhood at the corner of Cliffview Road and Weston in South Euclid is dotted with a few empty houses, and the house ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=98 Sometimes you wake up and say to yourself, “I want to be someone else now.” After two weeks in a rental cottage on Cape Cod, I wanted to walk away from the noise, but so much of it was coming from me, that I wasn’t sure how to put any ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=97 These are the words the editor Robert Linscott cabled to Truman Capote on reading early chapters from The Grass Harp, sent to Linscott from Italy where Truman was staying at the time. “There is a perfection about these two chapters that is simply miraculous.” One can imagine how lovely it ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=96 From the beginning, I have wanted to use a poem by Langston Hughes as an epigraph in Lunch-Box Dream, and now that the book is nearing advance reading copies, I’ve had to get permission to reprint it. Discovering the whereabouts of Hughes’s estate (he died in 1967) was a little ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=95 Carson McCullers gives Mick Kelly, the complex twelve-year-old girl at the center of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, both the tortured and splendid parts of herself when she was young. In one scene almost exactly midway through the book, Mick is with her brothers and a neighborhood boy, waiting ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=94 We’ve talked before about sequence (see FBR 69, below). The order in which a writer chooses (or does not or may not choose) to assemble the shelf of his or her career seems hugely significant in the course of an ongoing writing life, certainly more so than after it’s over ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=93 This morning I had breakfast with several writers and a writer/illustrator, and our conversation got round to things electronic, as the illustrator was in the process of turning some of his enormous output into E-book apps for the iPhone and iPad. Another of us, a writer of illustrated stories, was, ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=92 Your memory is a shop of old goods, both true antiques and cheap junk. It stands in a narrow passage the sun has never seen, a crooked alley off a series of crescents and side streets, far off the traveled road. This main road, by the way, is a ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=91 We are talking now about the early 1960s, after my family had moved from Ohio to Connecticut, and I was hanging around with my brother, who was a year older, and a boy named Tommy, an orphan who was adopted by a family two and half streets away from where ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=90 After a week filled to the gills with the sketching out of one book, the second revision of another, the last gasps of a third, and the first tremblings of a fourth, I've got, as they say, nothin’. Except this little nugget from a pleasant little book I picked up by ... http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?p=89