![]() ![]() ![]() My mother cried after she read the first few pages and never went back to it. Of his 2006 novel Smonk, he says, “People hated it. ![]() Still, Franklin has had to deal with the consequences of writing such bleak stories. The violence, it seems, serves a much deeper, emotional purpose. For instance, “The Ballad of Duane Jaurez,” one of the stories in Poachers, concludes with a scene in which the protagonist uses a shotgun to kill several cats, an act that encapsulates his frustration with having a wealthier, more successful younger brother. The stories in his first collection, Poachers, offer visceral depictions of violence that place Franklin among the likes of Cormac McCarthy and other writers who have managed to incorporate abject brutality into their writing as an important thematic aspect. “I tried to make them see that writers are just like everybody else, probably a lot worse than everybody else because we sit down by ourselves and our prostates get giant and our hemorrhoids grow.”Īlthough a few minutes with Franklin will show that he is decidedly not a monster and in fact very friendly and remarkably funny, it’s easy to read any one of his stories and conclude that he must be a severe and perhaps prickly individual, the kind of writer whose austerity and gloom contribute to the myth of the Tortured Artist. Like, shit, for me?” They were lucky, though, because Franklin is a good writer to meet if you’re looking to get a realistic picture of what it means to be a writer. They were breathless and scared and trembly. “They were terrified to meet me, like I was some kind of monster or someone with a really bad reputation for being mean or evil. One big difference in Germany is that no one there has really met writers, so when I go to these schools, I’m the first writer anyone’s ever met.” In 2016, when Franklin first met a couple of German emissaries tasked with interviewing him about his book, he was taken aback by how nervous they seemed. He says, “The United States is the exception on how literature is viewed in the whole world simply because we’re the only place with all these creative writing programs. This experience has provided Franklin with some insights into how the United States differs from other countries in their treatment of authors. Franklin has traveled to Germany twice now to give readings and participate in Q&A sessions with students. My book happened to fit.” The theme of the district’s curriculum that includes Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is “the ambiguity of belonging,” an appropriate theme for the novel, which centers on two childhood friends, one of whom becomes an outcast suspected of committing a decades-old murder and another who is an African American police officer in rural Mississippi. Now, every high school student in the third-largest state in Germany is required to read Crooked Letter, a development that Franklin says came out of nowhere. His 2010 novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, a New York Times bestseller, was selected as the abitur (or “high school”) book in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. ![]() The past year has been unusual for author Tom Franklin. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |