A good enough reason to re-up this from @oxfordamerican.bsky.social and Max George. oxfordamerican.org/magazine/iss...

Super excited to be included in issue 18 of the Arkansas International illustrating and adapting a 1957 short by Charles Portis into a comic. Comes out Saturday! Here’s a brief story from Ozarks at Large story on the issue here with more info www.kuaf.com/show/ozarks-...

Happy birthday to Lowell George, whose wandering spirit and slanted and enchanted imagination enlivens us more with each passing day, even as we lament his tragic absence. A few years back I wrote about Lowell and Little Feat for Oxford American. I'm still willing. oxfordamerican.org/magazine/iss...

We are having our library shelving rebuilt, which means 200–250 trips from the second floor to the basement carrying shopping bags of books. Jenkins joined me for the first dozen, then tapped out. It’s nice seeing the books. Hello, you wonderful weirdo.

Can confirm. Almost everything I’ve looked up on Google lately has generated an overview with some easily refutable mistake in it, like declaring that Bryan Cranston narrated the audiobook of True Grit.

Library of Congress Subject Heading: Eccentrics and eccentricities. Hell, yeah. They created a whole subject heading for Nancy Lemann and Charles Portis.

My book Carry the Rock was first published in 2010 but was reissued in 2023 by @uarkpress.bsky.social and is now being recorded as an audiobook. Flattered that it has legs. This @wsj.com review by Eddie Dean linked it to Charles Portis’s work without knowing I knew him! www.wsj.com/articles/SB1...

Only today did I learn that Sam Shepard hung out with Charles Portis, likely in Deming, NM with Shepard’s longtime friend Johnny Dark. This is from the Dark-Shepard correspondence, Two Prospectors, published by U of Texas Press in 2013. (More readable in alt-text)

El Dorado, Arkansas, surprised me on a weekend family trip with its pair of English telephone booths repurposed as little free libraries. Escaped with these gems.

"There's a case to be made for Elizabeth Nelson as the best rock lyricist of this moment. Nelson and the Paranoid Style are the most persuasive argument I know for the ongoing vitality of rock and roll." Psyched by this rad review of 'Known Associates' on Fresh Air today! www.npr.org/2026/03/06/n...

A total pleasure to meet @bdralyuk.bsky.social IRL on a quick trip to Tulsa. He told me a touching story about how Portis came to mean so much to him and we shared Berryman lines. Also, for those like me with meager output, a visit to the Guthrie and Dylan centers is both enthralling and humbling.

Congrats to Brett Martin on a National Magazine Award nomination for this story. You can never go wrong reading Brett.

In 2009, I “opened” for John Mulaney at an event put on by the Lowbrow Reader comedy zine. I was introducing neglected novelist Gilbert Rogin, whose works I helped get back into print. Tonight I’m seeing @mulaney.bsky.social perform live again, in a basketball arena in North Little Rock, Arkansas.

Thirty years ago today, I attended the book party for Infinite Jest. Just after Dave’s death I wrote a little about the party — and about editing a story of his for Tennis magazine — in a blog post on @mcsweeneys.net (along with contributions from @mattbucher.bsky.social and others).

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.

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.

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.