Where I Write #12: A Stable in the Floodplain
Across the Missouri River from North Omaha, just east of the intersection of Interstates 29 and 680, a few miles
Posts by: Joseph Michael Owens
An Afternoon with Ralph Steadman
“Don’t you think it’s a bit thin?” Ralph Steadman asks me, swirling a nice glass of wine, bolstering his weight against one of his kitchen’s walls, his piercing expression ultimately putting me on the spot.
Deus Ex Machina so far
Rumpus Book Club member Joseph M. Owens responds to this month’s book club selection, Deus Ex Machina by Andrew Foster Altschul.
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I always like to get my overall impressions of a book out of the way at the beginning in case someone is too impatient to read my entire review. With that said, I really liked Andrew Foster Altschul’s Deus Ex Machina.
...moreJoe Owens: The Last Book I Loved, The Wilding
Benjamin Percy can probably kick my ass. At least his prose gives me no reason to believe otherwise.
Equal parts grit, subtlety and a silver-tongued bravura, Percy’s style makes me kind of want to call him a prosaic assassin if only prosaic assassin didn’t sound like a new flavor of Cheetos. But there is a lot more to The Wilding than sheer alpha-male badassery, a lot more.
...moreJoseph Michael Owens: The Last Book I Loved, The Instructions
I flew to Chicago for a single night in October, just to hear Adam Levin read from the last book I truly loved, The Rumpus’ own Book Club pick, The Instructions.
At the time of Levin’s Chicago reading, I was nearly 900 pages into The Instructions (out of the novel’s 1,030 total), which made me fairly confident I wouldn’t hear any spoilers. Though, to be honest, at only 50 pages in, I could already tell that I was experiencing something special.
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