William Shunn : Page 4
The Falcon and the Snowman and me
In 1985, I was a far bigger fan of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny than just about any other musician. The album that infected me was 1982's Offramp, which sounded unlike anything else I'd ever heard. I became a hardcore consumer...
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Send your missionary a margarita!
In a message exchange a few months ago, a friend and former colleague from my missionary days reminded me of a funny story from 1988 involving the elder who was then my companion. I didn't immediately recall the incident, but...
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Our memories remind us, maybe mine is not so bad
I've always believed that I have a pretty good memory—in particular, that I can recall formative events and conversations from years or even decades ago in reasonably good detail. When I started work on my memoir The Accidental Terrorist, I...
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What David Mitchell is up to in “The Bone Clocks”
This post about The Bone Clocks contains mild spoilers. When grappling with works of genre fiction, most mainstream literary critics can be counted on to demonstrate a peculiar tone-deafness. Take the case of The New Yorker's James Woods, who calls...
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Readings on two consecutive nights
I'll be appearing next week in not one but two of Chicago's most electric reading series—or "live lit," as we call it 'round these parts. They'll be on consecutive nights, no less, so please block out April 16 and 17...
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Supercalifornication; or, how a hooker came between me and Oingo Boingo
The following story is an outtake from my memoir The Accidental Terrorist. The names of most of the other participants, including relatives, have been changed to offer some small measure of concealment. When I was eighteen, my father and I...
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Le mot juiced
I read the following essay, which appears in somewhat different form in the epilogue to The Accidental Terrorist, in the Essay Fiesta series at The Book Cellar in Chicago, on December 21, 2009. There is no worse feeling than, five...
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Hacking reality
Back in June, during the week I attended the Starry Heaven workshop in Flagstaff, organizer extraordinaire Sarah K. Castle put together a little panel discussion on the interactions between science fiction and actual science. Titled "Science + Fantasy = Science...
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New short story online
Batter up! My pulpy new short story, "The Visitors at Wriggly Field," is now online as part of the Pulps series at ChicagoIn2012.org. It's probably my first sports story, and may well be my last, so I hope you enjoy...
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Full chapbook cover
Mattias Adolfsson has posted his full original cover art for my upcoming chapbook in his blog: Great stuff! And John Klima has some nice things to say about both the art and the chapbook itself over at his blog. The...
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