Seth Harwood teaches writing and literature at the City College of San Francisco and Chabot College. In July 2006, he began
the Jack Palms Crime Podcast Series.
Earlier this month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
I’m reading Eight Million Ways to Die right now by Lawrence Block. Basically I’ve been sandbagged repeatedly by how good I find Block to be and how consistently excellent his work is. This is my first Matthew Scudder novel and I’ve been really impressed by how Scudder’s alcoholism sets the tension here and drives his motivation. His constant battle against drinking makes me care for this character and fear what he can get into.
I’m also reading Declan Burke’s The Big O and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is right next to my bed. Tree of Smoke is a big book, and I’m not likely to make much of a dent in it until I have some real free time, but he’s one of my favorite writers around and I think this book might just be his masterpiece.
For the classes I’m teaching now, I’m reading Capote’s In Cold Blood, a truly great, pioneering book in American creative nonfiction, and Steven Johnson’s Everything 
Bad Is Good for You, which makes me want to watch TV and feel good about it. On that note, I just finished watching the second season of Showtime’s Dexter, which I think is the best thing around by a mile, even up on The Sopranos level. I had to read the Lindsay books after I started watching the series, I just finished his second one, actually, and I find the series to be even better. I love the way it builds the different characters into complete people that you have to care about — all of them!
Harwood's stories have been published in
Post Road,
Ecotone,
Inkwell,
Sojourn: A Journal of the Arts, and
The Red Rock Review, among others, as well as in the online journals Storyglossia and zeek.net. His story “White” was nominated for a Pushcart prize.
His novel
Jack Wakes Up will be available in print in March 2008.
Visit
Seth Harwood's website,
his blog, and
his MySpace page.
--Marshal Zeringue
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