Friday, June 25, 2010

What is Nic Pizzolatto reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Nic Pizzolatto, author of the new novel, Galveston.

His entry begins:
The Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing- Most people know Fearing for his seminal crime novel The Big Clock, but his poetry is drenched in atmospherics and the particular existential dread dramatized by noir. It's far ahead of its time, anticipating the media and informational saturation of the present age, and the language that contains these revelations is elegant, sly, and darkly evocative.

The Complete Stories Finca Vigia Edition by Ernest Hemingway- always near at hand for their stylistic mastery. Sometimes I go months without reading it, then it'll be all I want to read for a couple weeks. I started to write a long paragraph about how important the writing in these stories is, but...[read on]
Among the early praise for Galveston:
"Galveston is a haunting and haunted tale, beautifully rendered, an uncommonly well written thriller moving in its descriptions of people struggling to escape the gravity of the past amid a ruinous landscape."
--Kem Nunn, author of Tijuana Straights

"Galveston is an assured debut full of hard truths, a throwback novel that ends up shouldering the noir genre forward."
--Chuck Hogan, author of Devils in Exile and Prince of Thieves

"Pizzolatto,like the great Richard Ford...expresses [his character’s] dissatisfaction in precise language, drawing readers into perfectly realized, frequently unconventional scenarios."
--Booklist

"Nic Pizzolatto’s beautiful, lucid prose seems to flow like water or like music. He knows how to write in the marrow of his bones. This will be the first of many brilliant books. Hooray for talent, that rare and lovely gift of the gods."
-- Ellen Gilchrist, author of Victory Over Japan and Nora Jane
Nic Pizzolatto's fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Oxford American, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Best American Mystery Stories and other publications. His work has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, and his story collection Between Here and the Yellow Sea was named by Poets & Writer’s Magazine as one of the top five fiction debuts of the year.

Visit Nic Pizzolatto's website.

Writers Read: Nic Pizzolatto.

--Marshal Zeringue