Sign up to see GQ contrib and Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan in conversation with the band Caveman on Tuesday, November 8 at the inaugural event of the GQ/FSG Original Series. Space is limited.
Critics have been going nuts for Sullivan’s book, out last week. The Times Sunday Book Review called Pulphead “the best, and most important, collection of magazine writing since [David Foster] Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and described Sullivan’s writing as “a bizarrely coherent, novel, and generous pastiche of the biblical, the demotic, the regionally gusty and the erudite.” Time said Sullivan “may be the best essayist of his generation.”
If you still need convincing, here’s a taste, from his piece “Upon This Rock” about a Christian Rock festival in rural Pennsylvania:
Seven miles from Mount Union, a sign read CREATION AHEAD. The sun was setting; it floated above the valley like a fiery gold balloon. I fell in with a long line of cars and trucks and vans—not many RVs. Here they were, all about me: the born again. On my right was a pickup truck, its bed full of teenage girls in matching powder blue T-shirts; they were screaming at a Mohawked kid who was walking beside the road. I took care not to meet their eyes—who knew but they weren’t the same fillies I had solicited days before? Their line of traffic lurched ahead, and an old orange Datsun came up beside me. I watched as the driver rolled down her window, leaned halfway out, and blew a long, clear note on a ram’s horn.
Oh, I understand where you are coming from. But that is what she did. I have it on tape. She blew a ram’s horn. Quite capably. Twice. A yearly rite, perhaps, to announce her arrival at Creation.
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You Do Not Want To Miss This: John Jeremiah Sullivan with Caveman
Sign up to see GQ contrib and Pulphead author John Jeremiah Sullivan in conversation with the band Caveman on Tuesday, November 8 at the inaugural event of the GQ/FSG Original Series. Space is limited.
Critics have been going nuts for Sullivan’s book, out last week. The Times Sunday Book Review called Pulphead “the best, and most important, collection of magazine writing since [David Foster] Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and described Sullivan’s writing as “a bizarrely coherent, novel, and generous pastiche of the biblical, the demotic, the regionally gusty and the erudite.” Time said Sullivan “may be the best essayist of his generation.”If you still need convincing, here’s a taste, from his piece “Upon This Rock” about a Christian Rock festival in rural Pennsylvania: Seven miles from Mount Union, a sign read CREATION AHEAD. The sun was setting; it floated above the valley like a fiery gold balloon. I fell in with a long line of cars and trucks and vans—not many RVs. Here they were, all about me: the born again. On my right was a pickup truck, its bed full of teenage girls in matching powder blue T-shirts; they were screaming at a Mohawked kid who was walking beside the road. I took care not to meet their eyes—who knew but they weren’t the same fillies I had solicited days before? Their line of traffic lurched ahead, and an old orange Datsun came up beside me. I watched as the driver rolled down her window, leaned halfway out, and blew a long, clear note on a ram’s horn. Oh, I understand where you are coming from. But that is what she did. I have it on tape. She blew a ram’s horn. Quite capably. Twice. A yearly rite, perhaps, to announce her arrival at Creation.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lty5hbZJC81qe6vsbo1_400.jpg)
