Note: This is a complete essay from Tin House’s 45th issue, Class in America, which should start appearing on newsstands nationwide September 1. Keep those peepers peeled!
I don’t suppose anyone has ever done an in-depth study of that interesting form of literary ephemera, the author dust jacket biography. But if they did, I’m sure they would notice a distinct sociological shift over the past decades. Back in the forties and fifties, the bios, for novelists at least, leaned very heavily on the tough and colorful professions and pursuits that the author had had experience in before taking to the typewriter. Popular jobs, as I recall, were circus roustabout, oil field roughneck, engine wiper, short-order cook, fire lookout, railroad brakeman, cowpuncher, gold prospector, crop duster, and long-haul trucker. Military experiences in America’s recent wars, preferably combat-related, were also often mentioned. The message being conveyed was that the guy (and they were, of course, guys) who had written the book in your hand had really been around the block and seen the rougher side of life, so you could look forward to vivid reading that delivered the authentic experiential goods.
My name is Mike Sacks and I have a book coming out from Tin House in March 2011. The book is called 
We can’t thank you enough for your support over the years–you read our magazine, you buy our books, you attend our workshops. And we’d like to give back to you–we really would. We want to look to the future and continue to innovate; we want move you with the stories, poems, and books we publish; we want to foster communities of people who love literature. But (from what Cheston’s told me) all healthy relationships depend on clear communication between parties. And to be honest, we could really use your help. As we start to invest more in the digital arena, we need to hear what it is that you’re looking for. What would you like to see in a new-and-improved tinhouse.com? What do you look for in your eBook-reading experience? What kind of features do you like in iPhone/Android/iPad apps? How come no one will add me on Friendster?
David Markson is going down fighting, and he’s not giving an inch to convention, zeitgeist, or potential sales. Born in 1927, Markson found success early with a series of genre novels; it helped that he was friends with Malcolm Lowry (about whom he wrote his Columbia dissertation, in 1952), Dylan Thomas, Conrad Aiken, and Jack Kerouac. One of his early novels, The Ballad of Dingus Magee, a parody of a Western, was turned into a mostly forgettable movie starring Frank Sinatra. At the time it would have been hard to imagine that his prose style would evolve, à la Mondrian, from crowd-pleasing genre fiction to spare, postmodern blocks of text, first with Springer’s Progress, a nasty little novel about a middle-aged novelist, then to Wittgenstein’s Mistress, an apocalyptic meta-novel featuring one- or two-sentence thought blasts, a book that David Foster Wallace called “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country” and upon which Markson could have built a po-mo empire. Instead, he refined his pointillism into a quartet of “novels,” Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, which feature a near total abandonment of narrative. 
NOTE: A slightly abridged version of this interview appears in the print edition of Issue #44. The complete, unabridged interview is an online exclusive.
I know not everyone is as fortunate as we Portlanders and Brooklynites. We get to choose from a variety of wonderful independent booksellers–kind, nurturing people (some good-looking) who nudge us toward a special volume and take great joy and pride when we return to tell them we loved it. Before the chains took over, and before Amazon’s dominance, many readers were limited to whatever selection graced the shelves of that store in the mall, the one crammed between an Orange Julius and the place with cool knives…so lets give credit where credit is due. Still, in an age of corporate conglomeration, dwindling arts coverage in the major newspapers, and faceless paypal checkouts, small presses like us rely on indie bookstores who take the time to fall in love with our books and then, thank god, hawk our wares.
But three seasons later, I suppose, that source material becomes a bit problematic—my hypothetical script a bit complicated. By the time David Halberstam embeds himself in the 1980 Blazers to write The Breaks of the Game (a departure from his political writings and war correspondence and, to my mind, the greatest book ever written about basketball), the stars of that movie are hardly recognizable. Walton, the literal and figurative center of the team, has cut his hair, rebranded himself a “born-again capitalist,” signed with the Clippers, and moved to Southern California. Power forward Maurice Lucas, the team’s enforcer and spark plug—the player who got himself kicked out of game two of the ’77 championship for picking a fight on his teammates’ behalf—has refocused his scrap and aggression on contract negotiations. Dr. Jack, in his plaids and patterned suits, seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown and can no longer control the play, or soul, of his team. “Portland,” Halberstam writes, “in its short ten-year history had known mostly the frustration of defeat and then in one magic year, briefly, the absolute joy of championship. That championship had come, and then almost as quickly been lost again.”
One of our great writers, Barry Hannah, died yesterday at age 67. 
Our own 
A semi-regular roundup of stuff we like from the internets and youtubes:
In the last year, two literary websites have fought their way onto that “top sites” screen that pops up when I open a new window in Safari–
