By Jane Sumner
Special to the American-Statesman
Those of us who gathered to say goodbye on the grassy slope of Republic Hill at the Texas State Cemetery on May 12, 2009, thought we’d heard the last from legendary author Edwin “Bud” Shrake. We were wrong.
Eleven years later, Shrake, dubbed “the lion of Texas letters,” has come roaring back with a crisp, wild and witty novel inspired by his real-life manic adventures as a screenwriter in 1970s and ‘80s Tinseltown.
A riveting read, Hollywood Mad Dogs is the same kind of “eyewitness fiction” as his superb incendiary novel Strange Peaches, about the right-wing hate and hysteria in Dallas before and after the Kennedy assassination.
Jamie Harrison’s
The Center of Everything is forthcoming from Counterpoint on January 12. Harrison talked to old family friend Thomas McGuane about the writer’s life, her father Jim Harrison, avoiding the clichés of the West, writing mysteries, and more.
Tom McGuane: I know that you were not attracted to a writing life at first because of memories of growing up on your father’s $8,000-a-year income, which eventually changed for the much better; but then you budged and have been productive ever since. Is this a legacy? You’re a very different writer.
Jamie Harrison: My father would sometimes read things out loud when I was a teenager I especially remember an early passage about a swan in Neruda’s
New York Trilogy in three separate volumes, Laurie Colwin’s
Happy All the Time, Barry Hannah’s
Ray, Robb Forman Dew’s
Dale Loves Sophie to Death (which won a National Book Award), Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried, Grace Paley’s
Later the Same Day, Larry Heinemann’s
Paco’s Story (another NBA winner), Frederick Barthelme’s
Moon Deluxe, Frank Conroy’s
Midair, Pete Dexter’s
You Bright and Risen Angels, Ivan Doig’s
English Creek, and Wallace Stegner’s
Crossing to Safety.
As is so often the case, editorial passion conquered timid conventional wisdom, and literature was born.