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I’ll be talking with Rick Kogan on “Sunday Papers” this Sunday, September 28, from 8:30-9 a.m. Central time. If you’re in the Greater Chicagoland area, that’s 720 AM on the dial (your radio does have a dial, doesn’t it?)–if you’re farther afield, you can listen online.
Hope you can tune in. Rick, besides being an institution in Chicago journalism, is one of the best book-panel moderators I’ve ever seen. If he can’t make me sound interesting, I don’t know who can. Although I promise to try to make me sound interesting, too.
I meant to mention this sooner, but last week, Time Out Chicago posted the second installment of “Back of the Book,” their new arts podcast, featuring a performance from “a local up-and-comer”: yours truly. (Do people ever tell you when you’ve become a “down and goer”?)
Anyway, the theme of the podcast is politics, which must be why I read the scene in One Nation, Under God where Seth and Ben go to a metal show at the Elks Club.
Actually, the selection had more to do with the podcast’s time requirements–you just try choosing a four-minute segment from your novel. Not so easy, is it?
The Chicago Sun-Times ran a nice review of One Nation, Under God yesterday (”‘One Nation’ takes a while to thrill but it’s worth the wait,” by Jeffrey Westhoff):
The tension builds slowly, but once Seth realizes his part in a fearsome conspiracy, One Nation evokes such paranoid 1970s thrillers as The Parallax View and Six Days of the Condor.
While noting that “the novel hardly fits the contemporary definition of a thriller” (I agree), Westhoff also compares Seth to “a film noir anti-hero” (I like it) and praises my ability to write “vividly about life in society’s margins, of dead-end retail jobs, squalid apartments and trailers on cinder blocks” (now I’m blushing).
Read the full review before the Sun-Times hides it!
Mr. Westhoff, you made my day.