Authors Electric

    If thou be'st born to strange sights,   Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights   Till Age snow white hairs on thee; Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me All strange wonders that befell thee From Song, by John Donne, 1573-1631 That’s the book. Riding the Yellow Trolley Car, by William Kennedy. I first saw it on a friend’s bookshelf 20 years ago and coveted it immediately. After a few weeks, a deal was struck. £5. It has been mine ever since. Maybe it was the cover that attracted me. Or, on browsing, the sections by Kennedy on writing, the wild and woolly flow of his early fiction writing which he described as being aggressively kick-started by long binges of words, eleven hours of writing at a time, words mostly discarded later, but not all… A method which sounded promising back then, 20 years ago, as I had as yet no sound ...

I was offline throughout May, so I Googled my name in June to see if anything had happened out there on the internet ether while I wasn’t looking. The first discovery was this piece on the blog, NOVELIST ONLINE ONPAPER, by Kenneth C. Crowe: “SATURDAY, MAY 25, 2013 John A.A. Logan, a great writer It has been a while since I’ve found a great writer--and John A. A. Logan is certainly one. If there were a genre called “unsparing,” that is where I would list Logan’s novel, THE SURVIVAL OF THOMAS FORD. He grips the reader in the opening chapter by portraying a universal symbol of modern times, an aggressive driver whose irresponsibility wreaks havoc in other people’s lives. The protagonist in question appears different from you and I—and he is. The characters Logan creates in this story of a fatal traffic accident, spiced by cowardice, are universally selfish with some being essentially cruel. Unexpectedly, one character emerges who refuses to cross the line into evil. Logan...