Recent readers to this site know that I’ve been evangelizing for John Williams since I read his novel Stoner.
This year I’m planning to read his novel Butcher’s Crossing (which I’ve been told is even better than Stoner, though I hardly believe that’s possible), and now I see that Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes is adapting it for film. Say what you will about Revolutionary Road (I thought it worked fairly well as a film, though it approached the material with with too much of a now-we-know-better smugness), this can only be a good thing for fans of John Williams. With an assist from Leo and Kate, Revolutionary Road
experienced a huge bump in sales and Richard Yates was briefly a spot of attention for the chattering classes.
One potential problem with the flick, though, is that Joe Penhall, who adapted The Road for film, is working on the script for Butcher. I know that it takes a lot of people to make a movie, but the end result of the cinematizing of The Road indicated that somewhere along the line they lost sight entirely of what the book was about and what made it so uniquely affecting and effective.
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas
The Disappearing Digital Data
Beckett’s Poetry
Imperial Fictions
Theresienstadt and the Problem of Knowledge in the Modern World
Reality Hunger Review @ B&N Review
Trash in Contemporary Literature
New @ TQC: JC Hallman & AWP
New @ TQC Sam Lipsyte Interview

I just read a review Stoner earlier today and was intrigued. I will have to check out Butcher’s Crossing as well. on another note, I have been patiently waiting for The Road to come to DVD, so I’m a little discouraged to hear it doesn’t do the book justice.
When will Sam Mendes stop hanging on the coattails of artists superior to him?