A few hours ago, a writer posted an email on the website HTML Giant. It appears that someone familiar with the writer Kyle Minor‘s work appears to have become hateful, due to certain words that the writer Kyle Minor uses within his fiction. Therefore, my audio series — Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project — must continue. The following clip represents my dramatic reading of the hate mail sent to the writer Kyle Minor, read in the style of a quiet socipath. I have also taken great care to send the writer Kyle Minor’s email to myself so that I could keep the “received in my inbox” aspect of the introduction true. I hope that sticklers for the authenticity of this series will permit me this slight digression.
I plan to continue reading more hate mail. Again, I will be happy to read any specific hate mail that you’ve received. (If you do send me hate mail for potential dramatic readings, I only ask that you redact the names of the individuals.)
Click any of the below links to listen.
Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project #3 (Download MP3)
Previous Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Installments:
#2: A hate mail read in a muted Peter Lorre impression
#1: A hate mail read in a melodramatic, quasi-Shakespearean style
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
A thousand kudos, Ed.
Patrick Bateman lives!
SENT FROM MY IPHONE
The way you said “Not much shocks me, anymore” made me bust a gut.
These things are absolutely brilliant.
Kyle Minor worked with a youth group?
Harold: Haven’t you ever read the essay “You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace” by Kyle Minor in that Twentysomething Essays book that Random House put out a few years ago? That’s his most well-known piece besides the novella “A Day Meant to Do Less” and it is all about how he walked away from evangelicalism and all that. It is also about a bully and a star fruit tree and a black man dying of lukemia. It socked me in the solar plexus the first time I read it. So you should not be surprised.
Only a quiet sociopath orders books from Amazon.