Daren Dean: Middle Path

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Middle Path

Trying to find the middle path
with a machete,
meditating on the breath
but your boy is asking
for another glass of water,
seeing a charming deity
in his impy smile,
you blow out the candle flame.

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Praise for Pale

"Daren Dean writes in the school of Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Tom Franklin, and William Gay. His fiction is funny, deep, ironic and just twisted enough to hold a reader tight. Daren Dean writes about people who have real problems, who know stock cars but not stockmarkets, who have no trust accounts but may have problems trusting their mate, who don't have bank accounts but know how to bank a fire in the fireplace. His characters carry guns and their son's carry guns. In Far Beyond the Pale, a kid grows up, the mean grow meaner, and we grow to care about what happens in this Missouri town that could be just over the rise from Faulkner's famous Jefferson, Mississippi."

--Clyde Edgerton

Author of Raney, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller, The Bible Salesman

"Rarely does a writer so own a landscape, a gift for comedy, a rich sympathy for his characters. In Dean’s fictional world, sexuality is a comic promise and a lethal threat. Tribal justice is played out among desperate ex-farmers and former-husbands. Turned to petty crime in a big-time way, these men become legends. Daren Dean charts admires and sings his desperados and their lovers--with the broken-hearted health of a born balladeer. He croons us a dark but beautiful world."

--Allan Gurganus

Author of The Last Confederate Widow Tells All, White People, The Prodigal Heart

"I believe he [Daren Dean] will join the other young Southern writers like Brad Watson and Tony Earley as a vital new voice."

--David Gessner

Author of Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature, Soaring with Fidel

"His work possesses a quick, dark wit similar to O’Connor’s — his narrators are self-deprecating and self-aware — as well as a characteristic fascination with the grotesque. His most astute awareness is of the alienation felt by a generation with increasingly absent parents. “I think my characters struggle with being true to their loved ones, and being true to your family is a way of being loyal to yourself,” he said in a follow-up e-mail. “They struggle with these loyalties because the characters … are divided within themselves.”

--The Columbia Tribune

FAR BEYOND THE PALE

In the darkly comic novel Nathan "Honey Boy" Kimbrough narrates a boy's search for a father and his mother's search for a man in 1970s Missouri. Honey Boy is a thirteen-year-old, four-letter spouting, pistol-packing kid who is determined to learn something about the art of thieving swag from Kingdom County's resident outlaw: Vaughn, a natural born killer with the conscience of a sociopath. What follows is a conclusion so violent that even Vaughn might wonder if he hasn't done his job too well. Vigilantes surround the outlaw at his favorite tavern with deer rifles and revolvers drawn in a modern southern novel with an explosive climax.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Middle Path

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