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louisbjones.com |
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Louis B. Jones |
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Recent Stories and Essays |
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 "The Epicurean"
Threepenny Review, Winter 2007 - Editor, Wendy Lesser
"The
Louis B. Jones in your new issue just killed me. What a great piece. I
had read two or three of his novels and was already a fan. but boy... a
new level. So glad it was you who had it. " — Charlie Haas, Oakland CA "Loved
the last issue of Threepenny. But most of all was knocked-out by the
story written by Louis B. Jones. What a wonder! — Michael Ondaatje, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Read an excerpt....
"A Note to Unpublished Authors"Writers Workshop in a Book:
The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction
Introduction by Richard Ford
Edited by Alan Cheuse & Lisa Alvarez
Chronicle Books (2007)
Read an excerpt
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| | Other Anthologies | | | |
 "The Stone"
Writers Harvest 2 (Paperback)
by Ethan Canin (Editor)
Harcourt (1996)
From Publishers Weekly
Family
tragedy, romance and other, more mundane daily routines are the
subjects of the stories in this collection edited by the author of The
Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief. A wide assortment of
well-known writers, such as Michael Chabon, Gary Krist, Julia Alvarez,
Henry Roth and Frederick Barthelme have contributed stories to benefit
the anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength. Perhaps because the
writers were mindful of their cause, the stories range from moving to
incredibly sad in their depiction of everyday humanity. Physical
suffering and illness are themes in many of the stories, from the
intense physical discomfort of a kidney stone, so perfectly described
in "The Stone" by Louis B. Jones to a cancer patient struggling to
maintain his dignity in Henry H. Roth's "This Time."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. | |
| |  "The Whole Idea of Cindy Potts"Hot Type: Our Most Celebrated Writers Introduce the Next Word in Contemporary American Fiction
by John Miller (Editor)
Collier Books (1988)
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| | Read Excerpts | | | | Excerpt from "The Epicurean" published in Threepenny Review, Winter 2007
Now
out here in California, reincarnated for a time in a version of an
inconsequential paradise, the most fantastic scandal, to me, about
Candace Roan was that she had studied seriously to be a nun. A
real Dominican nun. She had actually been in a convent. One
night while we took bites of fruit and sipped sweet dessert wine in a
shared snifter, she told me a story of something that happened during
the year when she was on the brink of taking her vows. I had been
teasing her about what a wonderful cliché it was, that a nun
should disguise a sexpot, who, as on a night of full moon, at last
scaled the high wall and got out on the streets and never looked back,
devoting herself to sin. It provoked this response: she drew a
breath and held it, thinking about whether or not to speak, and then
she told me that she had once done something… evil. That
pause was there. Evil is a simplistic or melodramatic idea,
probably seldom useful in application, and she arrived at the word with
some self-amazement, and some confusion, reluctant to settle such a
stole around her own shoulders, her at-that-moment naked shoulders.
It
was during her time in a San Francisco convent. To narrate, she
took back her leg and her arms and sat up against the bedstead, and
bowed her head to focus on the past, holding in both hands our misty
glass snifter of wine. I saw I wouldn’t get another
sip. She was taking possession of it as storyteller rather
formally. She said first of all, nuns are not necessarily
innocent in any special sense of the word: a convent is just another
human institution, and those high walls of dirty yellow brick (on Geary
Boulevard, beyond the big red Gap Superstore) enclose a society like
any other, just as liable to meanness or injustice, politics or
subterfuge, wit or pleasure or irony. Indeed, some of those women
are very sharp and couldn’t possibly dedicate themselves to
"innocence," in any simple understanding. Innocence -- she tagged
the tip of my nose with a green grape making me blink -- is
mysteriously distributed, both low and high in Creation. She
certainly didn't think of herself as naïve, when she first arrived
at the Convent of the Blessed Virgin Mary -- an Iowa girl in San
Francisco, doing three years of service in the world before her
novitiate. Twenty-two was an age she considered replete.
She had lived a full, happy, hedonistic life as a modern girl on a
modern college campus. In Cedar Rapids all the usual versions of
sin can be found: smoking marijuana in a dorm room, envying her
friends' beauty or money, letting herself be taken to burlesque clubs
on the Coralville strip, drinking singapore slings and sniffing lines
of cocaine in a condominium swimming pool complex with a lonely older
man, a man too old for such folly, a man who feels he has nothing at
stake in his life; and among her girlfriends the pleasures of the dark
heart like malicious gossip or frankly revealing clothes or, for a
while, systematically hurting the feelings of a rich handsome selfish
Chicago boy. Everything. The whole world is right there in
Iowa, the same satisfactions of vanity. And of course, as
everywhere, the several possible sexual contortions. She'd been,
during a time of early discovery, the sensualist that commercial
culture urges girls to be -- or at least she'd tried her best to be --
though she couldn't help feeling secretly that, honestly, for women sex
wasn't the great mind-emptying solution it seemed to be for men.
In taking the Chastity vow, she’d felt the most difficult trial
would be, not to deprive herself of pleasure, but to deprive herself of
children. She had come from a good family. She had had a
warm, confiding relationship with her father, cut off by his too-early
immortality. Also, she loved men, men in general, she loved being
around maleness, which a number of nuns did not: a surprising number of
nuns had had terrible early experiences. Perhaps her own men
tended to be outside the norm, a bit thoughtful or impractical, or sad,
or sensitive, rather than the louder simpler, more aggressive type of
male norm, whose nature seems imbued with a mysterious essential wrath,
and whom she found herself steering clear of. They were
fine. They were for other women
Copyright (c) 2007 Louis B. Jones. All rights reserved.
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| Read Excerpts | | | | Excerpt from "A Note to an Unpublished Writer"
Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction
The
special advantage of literature is that it doesn’t (like the
movies, say, or like people) dodge around and make a lot of noise and
then vanish from view: literature, on paper in dried-ink marks, is made
of assertions that stay put, fairly to be examined, lying open to the
play of the eye. Sentences committed to paper risk outlasting the
decades’ intellectual fads (fads which, you notice, even the mass
of smart people, the very most admired people, for an epoch, can get
sucked into).
Instead, the disembodied voice of the author says,
I’m alone in a room transcendent of history; you’re alone
now too; or if anyone is there with you, erase them from your
ear. Of course, you must build “my” story only out of
“your own” ideas and experiences; so in this mirror of a
shared sentence, recognition takes place: the actual
“writing” turns out to be, wholly or in part, the
“reader’s” job: the reader actively writes each
sentence as he goes: this little fountain of words rises within your
brain-stem. Its substance is provided by your reflection and
experience. The miracle of the grammatical sentence is that it
can be shared -- that it can thump softly through the wall of the
lonely self.
Copyright (c) 2007 Louis B. Jones. All rights reserved. |
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