Pygmies & Writers
The blog isn’t about politicians. I wouldn’t insult pygmies by that comparison. This first segment is about a novel, King of the Pygmies by Jonathon Scott Fuqua. Set in Havre-de-Grace, Maryland, a Cheasepeake Bay town 40 miles from Baltimore, it is the first person account of a 15-year-old male, a good kid. One day he begins to hear voices. Is it mental illness or, as his drunken ex-Sheriff uncle suggests, a gift? To complicate matters, he is experiencing first love. The title has nothing to do with those Africans that dwell in several countries on the dark continent. To reveal its meaning would act as a sort of spoiler. The narrative doesn’t go the way I hoped it would, which is not a bad thing. The ending is open, which is okay too. After all, the protagonist is a teenager. The prose and dialogue are true to someone his age. The 242 pages of the large paperback Candlewick Press edition read like considerably less. With the exception of a math teacher, all the other characters are decent folk. 13 readers at Amazon have rated King…, forging to a consensus of 4.7 on a scale of five. I rate it three, finding it unsatisfying. Fuqua has had at least ten books published, most geared to young adults, and has won several awards. According to the Author’s Note added to the addition in question, he is bi-polar. Despite this, he has been so productive. In his mid-50’s, he is a married father of two. Kudos.
Although I’ve seen film adaptations of at least two works based on the writing of Damon Runyon, I wasn’t sure I’d ever read anything by him, so I gave Sense of Humor, a short story, a crack. It’s part of the NYC literary antho I found recently, which I mistakenly dubbed a short story collection. It features poetry, essays and newspaper articles as well. Anyway, the story, which has several wise guys as characters, is a hoot that has a great twist. Runyon, born in Kansas, served in the Army while in his teens during the Spanish-American War. He was assigned to be a correspondent. He moved east in 1910 and became a quintessential New Yorker. In addition to many newspaper articles, he banged out three collections of poetry, twelve short story collections, a bio of WWI ace fighter pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, and a play: A Slight Case of Murder, co-written with Howard Lindsay. 20 of his stories were adapted to the screen. The Damon Runyon Theater radio series dramatized 52 of the stories, and Damon Runyon Theatre aired on CBS-TV from 1955 to 1956. He passed away at 66 in 1946. He never got to see the greatest part of his legacy, the Guys and Dolls musical, adapted from two of his stories, The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown and Blood Pressure, first produced on the Broadway stage in 1950, Music & Lyrics: Frank Loesser, Book: Jo Swerling & Abe Burrows .
Life, the world never ceases to amaze. This took place recently at ground zero of the coronavirus, Wuhan.
I moved up one car length today, so the toil wasn’t as great and I was able to schlep, as Nell would say, 50% of the wares into place. It was another good session for the floating book shop. My thanks to the woman in a burka who bought the massive Russian-English dictionary, and to the woman who works in the psych department of Coney Island Hospital, who purchased The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten; and to Michael, who went home with thrillers by Ed McBain and John Le Carre; and to the Frenchman, who pulled an Arthur Miller bio I’d forgotten was there out of a box; and to the woman who selected a Danielle Steel hardcover in Russian; and to the one who chose a novel in Russian; and to the gentleman who wanted something easy to read in order to help improve his English, who overcompensated me for Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. I don’t know if it’s easy. I just hope he’ll be able to relate to the Russian characters.
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