Read Hard (Edited by Ed Park & Heidi Julavits)

I enjoyed almost all of the selections from Read Hard, a collection of five years of writing from The Believer journal. I mostly skipped around and read the pieces that I thought sounded most interesting to me but I was surprised by a few as well. There were only a few articles that I skipped, which was mostly because the particular subjects of the writing didn’t interest me much as other subjects.  My favorite essays are: “No Man’s Land,” a powerful piece that manages to connect “bad” neighborhoods with Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Eula Bliss, “Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny,” an essay about the underappreciated and personal favorite author Charles Portis, by Ed Park, “In Praise Of Termites,” an essay about the film critic many Faber, by Franklin Bruno (author of Armed Forces one of my favorites in the 33 1/3 series), “Let Us Now Kill White Elephants,” about seminal rock critic Lester Bangs, by Howard Hampton,  “Waiting For Bad Things To Happen,” about the French bad boy writer Michel Houllenbecq’s book tour in America, by Sam Lipstye, and “The American Vicarious,” about Nathaniel West’s forward looking novels, by Jonathan Lethem. However, there were several other essays of interest including: “Gidget on the Couch” by Pete Lunenfeld, “And Suppress The Unpleasant Things” by William T. Vollman, “transit Byzantium” by Joe Hagan, “The Sinatra Doctrine” by Rich Cohen, “Symbolism And Cynicism” by Tayari Jones, and the frightening “The Score” by Stephen Elliott-READ WITH CAUTION, but read hard.