Now wondering if we’re related.

and, of course, sold the book, which isn’t as much this year’s writing but does portend some level of future writing bsky.app/profile/oliv...

#BOTD in 1933: Charles Portis. Here's the final paragraph from an early draft of TRUE GRIT. (His papers are in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State U.) He's still working out the final lines but what strikes me is how much of this draft resembles the final book. A master from the start.

The book I would give anyone — a ten-year-old boy, an eighty-year-old woman, a neighbor, a coworker, a loved one — is True Grit by Charles Portis. And the gift I would give anyone is a knife. Kitchen, steak, pocket, utility, multi-tool, etc. You can always use another knife. How about you?

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

I’m late on the exact anniversary but 40 years ago on Oct 22 I first met Charles Portis in person at the Town Pump for lunch after buying his just-published Masters of Atlantis at WordsWorth Books in Little Rock. Both places are still around and I think of him and miss him every time I visit one.

“I am so bored by AI. One of the things I love about the theatre is AI can’t do it.” Ethan Hawke is a dude 👌🏻

Come hear Sam Tanenhaus talk about his magisterial new book on William F. Buckley at the Clinton Center in Little Rock @clintonfoundation.bsky.social Tuesday at 6pm.

Local Goodwill find for $1.99.

Chaser; a great Charles Portis piece on life on the open road: oxfordamerican.org/magazine/iss...

Some news: My screenplay adapted from Kate Kruimink's historical novel A Treacherous Country has won the top prize at the Byron Bay Film Festival in Australia. I'm gobsmacked. www.filmink.com.au/public-notic...

As a former Vanderbilt walk-on football player (admittedly, for only about six weeks), I never thought I’d live long enough to see the Commodores in the Top 10.

No question that Charles Portis is exactly the kind of writer I am thinking about -- totally his own man, writing in his own way and unlike anyone else alive. Although he was clearly channeling the spirit of Mark Twain, bless him.

Thanks to @ghoward1950.bsky.social for this clear-eyed essay. To his list of once-neglected writers now acknowledged as masters, I’d of course add Charles Portis. I hope Gilbert Rogin also achieves the latter. The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/o...

“If you riff hard enough, you end up in the bedrock of shared humanity,” writes @girinathan.bsky.social in Defector. “At least if you’re as potent a riffer as Charles Portis.” A reader enters the hilarious and turbulent world of Portis’s 1979 gem The Dog of the South: defector.com/charles-port...

This is going to be my new favorite True Grit-themed restaurant.

Defector goes deep on The Dog of the South.

I sent Kaleb an early version of the newly discovered Portis fiction that appeared in @harpers.bsky.social and hoped he would write more about Portis. A heartfelt, wrenching appreciation here from Luke O’Neil.

R.I.P. Kaleb Horton. When I recently reread this memorial tribute he wrote on Charles Portis—one of the best Portis essays ever—I wrote to ask if he had this in the can or if he wrote it fresh. I was astonished to learn it was the latter. That's how good he was. Everything here is worth your time.

Doing crowdwork opening for Nate Bargatze in North Little Rock, Julian McCullough asked a 15-year-old in the audience what book he should have been reading instead of seeing the Sunday night show and the boy replied, "Small Things Like These." Kudos to that kid's teacher whoever they might be.

Vroman's Bookseller Recs: TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis Recommended by Anne A western for people who don't especially like westerns, True Grit is smart, funny, and full of rip-roarin' adventure! vromansbookstore.com/book/9781590...

Attention journalists! If you report on national security, space, AI, climate change, the environment, and/or local economic and health issues, attend this year's free Nuclear Reporting Summit on October 9-10 near Little Rock, Arkansas, to discuss how these are all connected. Details in the link.

My first-grader daughter brought this home from school today. I feel seen under her don’ts.

My 6-year-old-daughter and I were stopped on a freeway frontage road next to a building with a big sign reading CENTERFOLDS, and I had to explain that some people pay to watch origami.

Tried using Chatgpt 5 to look up 1918 rail routes. It's still useless. Still confidently reports made-up nonsense. Still sneakily gives links to unrelated websites, or sites that give facts flatly contradicting chatgpt. It'll send you on wild goose chases. Credulous users are a danger to us all.

Dwight Garner quite rightly recommends Charles Portis's Dog of the South as a great road-trip read— "the fullest flowering of his particular kind of genius"—but the article links to the original NYTBR review from Larry L. King, who doesn't get it at all. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/b...

Enchanted, in all its meanings, by the poetry of Christian Lehnert in Wickerwork, as translated by Richard Sieburth. The poet is deeply and movingly engaged with all nature, even algae, moss, larvae. A quiet comfort amid chaos. @archipelagobooks.bsky.social

Nine years ago, @oxfordamerican.bsky.social produced a variety show celebrating the 50th anniversary of Charles Portis’s NORWOOD. Backstage, voice artist Fred Newman discovered a new sound from Harrison Scott Key’s ear.

It's still summer, right? I've just gotten my beach reads lined up. #charlesportis #mavisgallant #readmoremavis #booksky

I'll never forget being on a shoot in a model's apartment and being surprised to find a first edition hardback of True Grit by Charles Portis. "Oh, it came with the house," she told me. "They all did." I stole it, of course.

It’s not often that this Faulkner gets an honor on a wall of writers, but the stairwell at Weidmann’s restaurant in Meridian includes John Faulkner in its notable writers of Mississippi. (His brother is here, too, of course.)

I tried to wrestle with the enormous, too-brief life of poet Frank Stanford and James McWilliams' monumental new biography for the @arktimes.bsky.social. (My review opens with a surprise Portis appearance.) arktimes.com/rock-candy/2...

Just a note from this lovely place. I've got a job toilet-cleaning at the tennis.

Overheard between my 6-year-old and her 5-year-old friend painting in the next room. 6: We can do abstract art. 5: What’s abstract art? 6: It’s crazy things. Something that doesn’t mean something. 5: Oh, I love abstract art.

The day A.I. can churn out the nuanced humor of Portis is the day the earth will stand still. This McCarthy / Portis blender crap should be flushed.

Nobody needs or wants this slop.

The day I got my Masters degree at the U. of Chicago in 1981, I rode down the elevator in the boutique hotel where my parents were staying with James Taylor. I said, “You’re James Taylor.” “Yep.” “I’m getting my Master’s degree today.” “Congratulations.” Then he was out the door & onto the tour bus.

Wish I could make this event. @jesswalter.bsky.social and Maria Semple are both big Charles Portis fans…

“…the discovery only affirmed for me the mystery of artistic creation. The alchemy a writer conjures when sitting down and facing a blank sheet of paper, yellow long bond or any other, cannot be traced to research or outlines or travels reconstructed from gas receipts.” @jayjenni.bsky.social

#TBT 24 years ago this week, I reconnected with my former student @rhettmiller.bsky.social for a piece about @officialold97s.bsky.social for Time Out New York.

In @thetls.bsky.social I review a smart new selection of Zbigniew Herbert’s verse. One of the 20th C’s indispensable poets, H. wrote of and for his time but kept his eye on eternity; our era’s crises were to him acts in the unending drama of the human condition. www.the-tls.co.uk/literature-b...

“She finds herself an old-timer with some money or some insurance or some property. She marries him and then sprinkles rat poison all over his food from a saltshaker with extra big holes in the top.” A new story from Charles Portis.

Bookmail! Any time a @byslp.bsky.social book arrives is a banner day. I know very little about lacrosse but I’m about to learn!

Siri pronounces Centro-Matic as if it were Eastern European, with the “-tic” as “-titch.”

Nope.

Can’t see the headline “The Revolving Restaurant Is Back” without thinking if this passage from The Dog of the South.

“A woman calling herself Doña Beatriz was boasting in print that she knew the 144 names of power and how to utter them properly, unbroken in sequence.” A never-before-published story from Charles Portis.

Bravo to Sara Gran for putting Charles Portis’s underrated GRINGOS on this list. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/b...

Oh, nothing. Just an excerpt from an unpublished Charles Portis novel. I’ll get back to you once I stop levitating.