Jack O'Connell

Fine article on our friend Jack on Galleycat today:



The (Long-Awaited) Return of Jack O'Connell by Ron Hogan

One of the first questions I had for Jack O'Connell when we sat down to lunch last week to talk about his new novel, The Resurrectionist: "Where the hell did you go?" I fell in love with his writing when I was a bookstore clerk at Dutton's Brentwood Books, and we handsold the heck out of Box Nine and Wireless, but somewhere in the late '90s I lost track, and then when I saw his name in the Algonquin catalog a few months back, I knew what I was going to be reading, well, right about now.

"The first answer is that Word Made Flesh [his 1999 novel] is a really dark book," O'Connell explained, admitting that he's been getting this question a lot. "By the time I finished, I had a couple young kids, and I didn't want to go back into the dark." So he spent years working on a light road novel, which he described as "Mike Ovitz and Britney Spears do Kerouac," and though he liked it a lot, "my agent strongly felt that whatever readership I had built up, I would probably derail." He set the manuscript aside for three months, took another look, and agreed. So then he came up with the idea for The Resurrectionist, which he was sure he could bang out in six months. It took five years.

For the rest go here http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/the_longawaited_return_of_jack_oconnell_83119.asp#more