Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project #3
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on September 2, 2009
Filed Under Dramatic Readings, Hate Mail
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
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
A thousand kudos, Ed.
Patrick Bateman lives!
SENT FROM MY IPHONE
[...] from Our Own Comments Threads- Ed Champion’s Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project now includes the letter Kyle Minor posted yesterday in the comments on Catherine Lacey’s post [...]
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.
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[...] here if you so, sow, sough desire) has been made into audio art. Very cool site. I think the Kyle Minor one is probably the best and I did much [...]
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[...] in the style of Richard Milhous Nixon #4: A hate mail read in the style of a drunken Irishman. #3: A hate mail read in the style of a quiet sociopath #2: A hate mail read in a muted Peter Lorre impression #1: A hate mail read in a melodramatic, [...]