In my time running this website I’ve discovered, rediscovered, and otherwise enjoyed the works of various writers I might not have in other circumstances. Among my favourite discoveries this year was John Jeremiah Sullivan, who I’ll leave it to James Wood to introduce, from his review of Sullivan’s latest collection of essays, Pulphead:
He seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and has a memory of childlike tenacity. Anecdotes fly off the wheels of his larger narratives. In a touching piece about the near-death of his brother (who electrocuted himself with a microphone while playing with his band, the Moviegoers, in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky), Sullivan mentions, in passing, “Captain Clarence Jones, the fireman and paramedic who brought Worth back to life, strangely with two hundred joules of pure electric shock (and who later responded to my grandmother’s effusive thanks by giving all the credit to the Lord).” Any reporter can be specific about the two hundred joules. But the detail about Captain Jones giving all the credit to the Lord, while a small thing, suggests a writer interested in human stories, watching, remembering, and sticking around long enough to be generally hospitable to otherness.
You can buy Pulphead from Amazon right now, but in the meantime I’ve collected some of my favourite John Jeremiah Sullivan essays here, in no particular order, for your enjoyment.
The Paris Review, 2010
When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux.
GQ, 2010
Insane birthers and Glenn Beck-worshipping tea-partiers, proud racists and gun-toting antigovernment loons—they’re all here, and they’re all angry about something.
GQ, 2005
Where do you go after you leave the cast of The Real World? To a universe where your only job is to be young and famous and keep the party jumpin’. Or to a tiny hell of endless exploitation.
New York Times, 2011
Something you learn rearing kids in this young millennium is that the word “Disney” works as a verb. As in, “Do you Disney?” Or, “Are we Disneying this year?” Technically a person could use the terms in speaking about the original Disneyland, in California, but this would be an anomalous usage. One goes to Disneyland and has a great time there, probably — I’ve never been — but one Disneys at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. There’s an implication of surrender to something enormous.
GQ, 2011
When the generation-defining writer David Foster Wallace took his own life in 2008, he left behind an unfinished novel, The Pale King, that will either serve to round out his transcendent body of writing or place a haunting question mark at the end of his career. John Jeremiah Sullivan holes up with the new book and considers the legacy.
GQ, 2005
Katrina created what was almost certainly the largest storm surge ever recorded in the United States: official numbers are still forthcoming, but it was around thirty feet. A lot of the people who died in Mississippi did so because this inundation happened monstrously fast. You were listening to the wind at your windows, wondering if you should flee, then you were trying to grab at the uppermost limbs of trees as you went rushing by. One older woman told me a giant sea turtle swam through her kitchen while she perched on the counter.
If you have any favourites I didn’t include, let me know on Twitter. You can also plumb Give Me Something to Read’s archives for more writing by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
