Category Archives: Books

Forest of Fortune playlist

Many thanks to David Gutowski at Largehearted Boy for publishing my Forest of Fortune playlist. Here’s the introduction:

My novel is informed by the five and-a-half years I spent working at an Indian casino. One of the characters, Alice, is a Native American woman who is haunted by trains. The inspiration for this character comes from a period in my life in the 1990s when I went to grad school in a mountain town on the edge of the Navajo reservation.

The songs are from a surprisingly un-punk roster of artists that includes Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Cypress Hill, PJ Harvey and Santana, whom I loathe. Read the rest of the essay

Two guys named Jim celebrating the Forest of Fortune paperback launch! Now excuse me while I finish this chapter… (at The Voice of Santa Fe KVSF 101.5)

3 Questions

Many thanks to Red Cell at the Santa Fe Reporter for doing this short interview  where we talk about casinos, addiction and my love of pulp fiction. An excerpt:

Your book has the attitude of a crime drama in the vein of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Was the hard-boiled genre an influence on your writing?

Yes, absolutely! When I got out of the Navy and college, I wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea how to go about doing it. I really didn’t feel like I learned how to write in school. I started reading crime novels by Jim Thompson and David Goodis, and a lot of pulp writers that were published in Barry Gifford’s Black Lizard series.

Read the rest of the interview here.  If you’re in Santa Fe this Friday, I’ll be reading at Collected Works.