By: John Mark Boling,
on 2/11/2008
Jenny Shank takes a look at Charles Portis's classic novel True Grit in New West, the fine magazine and website that bills itself as the "Voice of the Rocky Mountains." Shank suggests that "the irresistible voice of Mattie Ross rings as clear today as it must have in 1968." Overlook has reissued True Grit in new paperback edition featuring in introduction by novelist Donna Tartt.
By: John Mark Boling,
on 12/7/2007
In a recent essay on Salon, Allen Barra celebrates the 40th anniversary of True Grit, the Charles Portis classic recently reissued by The Overlook Press: "True Grit shares this with Portis' other novels: His characters are relentlessly grim while his prose is relentlessly funny. As Roy Blount Jr. put it, "Portis could have been Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he'd rather be funny." That humor is often grim and always subtle; Portis is light-years from being 'the quintessential Southern humorist' he is often reputed to be, because he isn't a quintessential anything except original. I will leave it to others to determine whether True Grit is Charles Portis' best or quintessential novel, but it is the best Portis novel to read first."
By: John Mark Boling,
on 9/18/2007
Great notice today of Overlook's triumphant reissue of Charles Portis' True Grit, with a foreward by Ms. Donna Tartt on Papercuts, Dwight Garner's New York Times Book Blog:
Last week, when I posted some samples of Eliot Fremont-Smith’s memorable reviews from the mid-1960s, there was one I forgot – his piece on Charles Portis’s 1968 masterpiece “True Grit.”
Fremont-Smith effortlessly nailed the book’s breathless comic tone:
By: John Mark Boling,
on 9/11/2007
arkansas, represent!