Craig McDonald

Craig McDonald is the Edgar®/Anthony nominated author of Head Games, Toros & Torsos, and Print the Legend.

His new novel is One True Sentence.

Earlier this month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

My reading time has become alarmingly scarce the past several months between fulltime journalism, evening and weekend fiction writing/book touring, and the pending release of two novels this calendar year.

Consequently, I’ve been squeezing in quick reads of books related to or feeding my own works-in-progress, or regarding personalities that touch on things I’m toying with in some way.

At the moment, I have four books going simultaneously.

• I’m re-exploring the uneasy, at times mutually destructive, friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as told by Matthew J. Bruccoli in Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship.

• At the same time, I’m slowly making my way through the don’t-drop-it-on-your-foot, massive biography Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame by Benita Eisler. Mostly, as I press on, I find myself continuously struck by how little the literary life has changed since the Romantic period in terms of publicity demands, censorship, critics and the uneasy friction of writers as friends (ala Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for instance).

• The Films of Sam Peckinpah by Neil Fulwood: A warts-and-all study of the brilliance and wasted promise of the films of that magnificent bastard who was Peckinpah, an artist time and again undone by the system, intruding execs, and, to be fair, his own demons.

• Lastly, Crystal & Stone by Joe Ziemer: A biography of one on my favorite singer/songwriters, the late and criminally under-known Mickey Newbury. (Though, if you’ve seen The Big Lebowski, whether you knew it or not, you have heard at least one Newbury classic — think bowling pins and showgirls.)

Learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Toros & Torsos.

The Page 69 Test: Head Games.

The Page 69 Test: Print the Legend.

My Book, The Movie: Print the Legend.

The Page 69 Test: One True Sentence.

--Marshal Zeringue