Forty - Softcover

Name: Forty
Author: Saunders, Jack
ISBN: 9780945209010

Saunders, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0945209010 ISBN 13: 9780945209010

Publisher: Popular Reality, 1988

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In the no-holds-barred "Florida writer" tradition, Jack Saunders writes stories about publishing, academia and everyday life, about what it's like to work and succeed while being true to oneself and one's family and culture. He writes masterfully and musically, with encyclopedic knowledge, about how this effort relates to the world around him, other authors, books, movies, music, Florida, cooking, his life, work, business, progress. In folk vernacular, FORTY is a slice of a much larger ouevre--with letters, memoir, poetry and essay all playing off each other. In the end, though, "it's just stories." Jazz and the blues. In the mainstream of American outsiders: Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Kerouac, Miller, Algren, Thompson, Bukowski, MacDonald, Willeford, Burke, Hiassen and Finster. As he says, the Cracker spirit lives on and a country boy will make do. Except for insiders, he is entirely unknown. But he's been working hard, prolific and giving it his all for 25 years. Why haven't you heard of him? Find out for yourself...

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From the Publisher

In Jack Saunders our generation is extremely lucky to have a powerful and determined writer, an honest writer. A Diogenes not merely of words, but of provocative thoughts. From his hideaway in Florida, like a super-energized lobster, Saunders lashes out at the sickening hypocrisy which is deadening our senses and rotting our souls. It is Saunders' adamant, boneheaded, determined persistence that is his great strength, his great gift to a society staggering in its own materialistic greed. Saunders is America at its best. He spells out what spirit is all about. And humanity. How do we live? When do we really come ALIVE? As we should? And deserve? America needs writers with such strength and ferocity and independence and integrity, not all those greedy little wordmongers contemplating their private parts on every supermarket shelf. Saunders is more than a literary volcano. He is a live, writhing, crackling wire. Spewing sparks in all directions. Creating and developing a brighter, newer world. --Raymond Barrio

Review

All fine hard hitting work. The works of Jack Saunders give us hope. Hope that our lives won't be horrible wasted foolishness. Even when it seems that hope is all we have left, if you feel you can live a fuller life and spend your days in a more profitable way for yourself AND MANKIND you should read Jack Saunders for a ray of hope and a great deal of enjoyment and amusement. OK it rings so true that you'll forget you're reading & think you're talking to yourself. -- Larry Schlueter

As exasperating and slippery a "read" as they come. This work is totally unpretentious (and thus honest) and yet its theme is the total unrelenting pretension of a life. That life is excruciating and unavoidable, unedited and ambiguous, squalling and scrawling, elegant and vulgar, ordinary and completely out of the ordinary. Read it; you'll never forget it. -- John M. Bennett

Hey it broke me up--I imagined someone calling here and asking what I was crying about. I was not crying, kid. I was laughing at Jack Saunders' new movie. -- David Zack

I have a hunch your stuff is wild and terrific and keeps going off the rails. I have no better explanation for why you don't find publishers, since you certainly write well enough sentence for sentence and paragraph for paragraph. -- Norman Mailer

Nothing studied about this one. He just knows. And does. It hangs together, flows together, makes a lot of sense. Cooking like a Tasmanian Dervish. All I can do is tip my hat. -- Carl Weissner

Saunders is genuinely doing his best to figure out what he is all about and get it onto paper. Moreover, he truly casts his harangue every which way against the evils the undiscovered artist has to contend with: the financial success of tenth-raters, the cheap shots of unsympathetic fellow unknowns, the government's and big business's sanctimonious pseudo-support of the arts (or should I say genuine support of pseudo-art, and obsolete art?) and all the rest of it. I applaud this because I feel, as an unrecognized universal genius myself, that what he's saying ought to be said; and I'm glad he's saying it so energetically that I don't have to. -- Bob Grumman

This is some very clever writing...rings true to my own wars with the publishers--good luck! -- Theodore Roszak