Noir at the Bar with "Dope Thief" author Dennis Tafoya
Noir at the Bar
presents
Dennis Tafoya
author of
Dope Thief
“Dope Thief is first-rate literary noir, the hardest-core crime novel I’ve read this year. It manages to be funny without ever descending into the trivial, and at its core it’s harrowing. An amazingly assured debut by Dennis Tafoya.”
— Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway and Cottonwood
“The plotting is solid, and the action has a hard, violent edge that recalls Richard Price.”
— Booklist
“A boy `born into the life’ makes a wrenching attempt to change course or die trying in a first novel that marks Tafoya as a writer to watch.”
— Publishers Weekly
“An impressive debut by a writer savvy enough to understand that the way to a
reader’s heart is often as not through flawed characters.”
— Kirkus Reviews
presents
Dennis Tafoya
author of
Dope Thief
“Dope Thief is first-rate literary noir, the hardest-core crime novel I’ve read this year. It manages to be funny without ever descending into the trivial, and at its core it’s harrowing. An amazingly assured debut by Dennis Tafoya.”— Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway and Cottonwood
“The plotting is solid, and the action has a hard, violent edge that recalls Richard Price.”
— Booklist
“A boy `born into the life’ makes a wrenching attempt to change course or die trying in a first novel that marks Tafoya as a writer to watch.”
— Publishers Weekly
“An impressive debut by a writer savvy enough to understand that the way to a
reader’s heart is often as not through flawed characters.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Read an excerpt from Dope Thief here.
======================
When Dennis is done, stick around for legendary columnist, novelist and screenwriter Pete Dexter reading from his new novel, Spooner.
When Dennis is done, stick around for legendary columnist, novelist and screenwriter Pete Dexter reading from his new novel, Spooner.
=======================
When: Wednesday, September 30th at 6:00 p.m.
Where: The Pen and Pencil Club,
1522 Latimer Street, Philadelphia, 215-731-9909
http://www.penandpencil.org/index.php
Where: The Pen and Pencil Club,
1522 Latimer Street, Philadelphia, 215-731-9909
http://www.penandpencil.org/index.php
Labels: Dennis Tafoya, Noir at the Bar
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 2:09 PM
34 Comments:
Not to take anything away from Mr. Tafoya, who I don't know, but Pete Dexter???
Yep, ex-Philly guy Peter Dexter, who presented an awkward dilemma. He is actually not part of my event, but will speak at separate event at the Pen and Pencil immediately afterward. Between now and the time you read this comment, I probably will have changed my mind several times about how best to mention his name in this announcement.
Hey Peter, I am blown away by being able to see both Dennis and Peter there! See you then! Lou
Yep, that should be an evening of good stories, all right.
This sounds complicated, but I hope it turns out to be in a good way.
Not in the least. I planned my event, and then the manager of the club said Pete Dexter would be in town the night before (yet another author event at the Free Library), adn would I willing to start my event half an hour earlier to accommodate him? Sure, I said, figuring that a National Book Award winner and storied Philadelphia columnist who turned to fiction after getting the living daylights beat out of him right here in this city could only draw a few extra people for Dennis' part of the evening.
It will be my first public appearance with a little titanium post where tooth #31 used to be. The surgery today was a piece of pastry, and I have some good painkillers for when the anaesthetic starts wearing off. It was an odd sensation having this thing literally screwed into my head.
We salute you, tooth #31. But titanium is a good thing. So are painkillers.
Paris Trout is a wonderful, if harrowing novel. I am sorry about the beating he took, even if I don't know quite what happened. '
v word is good here. It's "potiv
What's missing from my last comment is a closing ".
My next v word is also great. So you go to Noir at the Bar and say you write fiction? Why not just accept that you are a "fictist".
Potiv sounds like an early Modern English words whose meaning combines elements of "potent" and "explosive."
I haven't read Pete Dexter, but I have heard that "Paris Trout" is harrowing. A fellow I talked to today at a bookstore called it depressing.
All I had known about the beating is that Dexter was in the company of his friend, the heavyweight boxer Randall "Tex" Cobb, who suffered a broken arm in the fight. If you're with a heavyweight boxer who fought champions, and he gets his arm broken, that was a serious fight.
I read today that Cobb and Dexter had gone to a bar to meet with the family of a murder victim about whom Dexter had written a story that displeased the family. There were thirty of them. And baseball bats.
The Fictist is a disturbingly (or annoyingly) literary title for a novel, and it's a fine v-word, too.
Where would one expect to find a word like fictist? In some Victorian novel or essay, I suspect.
I'm glad to learn that you're favorably disposed toward titanium, by the way. One rarely sees opinion of any kind expressed about any element, much less about a strong, lustrous, corrosion-resistant transition metal.
People are not generally well disposed toward Titanium. Titanium man is an evil supervillain, for instance.
Peter, it's time to refresh your Italian for this nice interview :Il giallo invisibile
v-word: defaultru
Jesus--sounds like Pete is lucky to have lived to tell the tale.
Well, yes, the story is harrowing and depressing, but that's no reason not to read it. It's talking about a certain kind of way power plays out in the world. It's odd, because I realize I must have read it around the same time I read a book called "Praying for Sheetrock" by Melissa Fay Greene, which is a non-fiction book about the same kind of small town southern sheriff with way too much clout. It was excellent, but again, depressing.
Titanium's power can apparently be used for good or evil. Dental work would seem to redeem it, though.
Marco, I took up the challenge immediately and was able to read the interview's introductory paragraphs with little trouble. This is often the case with me, however, so the real challenge will come later when I get to the substance of the interview.
This Loriano Macchiavelli seems like an interesting figure, of the kind we don't have many in the U.S.: a brilliant theorist of genre fiction being interviewed in a magazine of literature, imagination and the culture of opposition? Nope, no one comes immediately to mind in this country.
Titanium Man sounds so innocent and bouncy in that song by Paul McCartney.
Seana, Pete Dexter spent at least part of his youth in Milledgeville, Georgia. I'd guess the book is rooted in his experience there. In re the beating, an article I read about him described his injuries. "Dental devastation" was the least of them. The bookstore owner who called Paris Trout depressing yesterday said that the beating almost killed Dexter.
He also told me that either he or his fellow owner used to hang out with Dexter and Warren Zevon when the latter lived in Philadelphia.
Titanium alloys are used in aircraft, armor plating, naval ships, spacecraft, and missiles. This is due, I read, to its "ability to withstand moderately high temperatures without creeping." As far as I am concerned, the ability to avoid creeping is a good thing -- an unalloyed good, you might say.
Milledgeville is Flannery O'Connor territory, so that's quite fascinating. I'm very glad he lived, and I feel a bit remiss now in not having gone on to more of his work.
v word=rerack
So I suppose we are into pool hall metaphors now.
Also, I think The Believer does interviews that sound very much like the Macchiavelli interview all the time, from your description of it.
Well, he's still around and still writing, so you can ease your misgivings without too much trouble. He'll be reading from his new novel here at the P&P, and that could be what gets me started reading him.
I read and very much liked Flannery O'Connor years ago, so this thread could get me reading her again as well the next time I take a break from this crime stuff. (Today's reading has been Emerson's essay "History." That dude was high on life.)
I'd say I ought to know more about The Believer, in that case.
The invisible giallo. An interview with Loriano Macchiavelli, Part 1 of 2, by Marilù Oliva
[It is an honor for Carmillia to pay homage to Loriano Macchiavelli, the most brilliant theorist and most tenacious organizer in genre fiction in Italy. A cordial personage and at the same time accustomed to modesty, deeply human, nonconformist: an example of how a true writer should be. Thanks to Marilù Oliva for agreeing to talk with a real master, in the literal sense of the term. Everyone We have all learned something from Loriano.] (V.E.)
Well, there is a California inflection to the way The Believer comes across for sure, but I think in the end, it more or less adds up to the same thing.
I had not heard of it before. But then, I thought love was only true in fairy tales.
Was that an automatic translation?
v-word: preter (someone who goes beyond peter)
The second part
v-word: ingraphe
Wish I could be there, I met Dennis at Bouchercon last year and Dope Thief (what a great title) sounds very good.
v-word: thespeiv
Something theatrical, I guess.
Marco, I think my rough and ready translation has just been compared to the work of a machine -- no compliment, considering the translations machines turn out.
A preter is any one of my ancestors.
John, I've just started Dope Thief, and I can see why Scott Phillips blurbed it. The sense of humor is similar to that in S. Phillips' books.
thespeev could be something that really pisses an actor off.
Marco, thanks for the second part o the article. I was reading the first at the Pen & Pencil Club, where I did not ask for help from the two Italian customers.
It would have been scary if it were the work of a machine, but machine translation is evolving everyday. It was good, but a bit too literal - "Everyone we" in particular.
And for no reason at all, or maybe because you talked about Names,Verbs etc. elsewhere, here's the link to a delightful fable: The Grammarian's Five Daughters
v-word: dinge (things)
Nouns, not names.
"Everyone we" was not excessive literalism, it was a typographical error. I changed my mind about how to translate the sentence but neglected to erase what had gone before. But I think that student translations, done for examinations rather than for publication, tend to excessive literalism, and translation for examinations is about the only kind I've done.
If I were translating the passage for publication, I might have gone for "Loriano has taught all of us" or "has something to say to all of us," for their more colloquial feel. I don't know which would best match the tone of the original because I don't know Italian that well.
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