Here’s some of the best news I’ve heard all year: Cormac McCarthy’s play, The Sunset Limited, has been turned into an HBO film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. It premiers on Feb. 12. Trailer here.

Charles Dodd White has a mini-essay where he gripes about what he calls the “new minimalism.” I’m not sure I totally understand the kind of fiction he’s describing, but it sounds akin to the recent emergence of flash fiction or short-short stories. Maybe we’re talking about two different things, but I’m seeing flash fiction as part of an emerging spectrum between poetry and prose. The poetic line used to be a crucial difference between the two, but recently poets have begun avoiding the line altogether with prose poetry (and some have even been ignoring coherence altogether with language poetry). Meanwhile, fiction writers, maybe influenced by Borges and Barthleme, have begun ignoring narrative constraints and writing something akin to prose poems with paragraph breaks (Borges called his work “fictions” rather than “stories”).

I’ve not paid close attention to either group (poets or fiction writers) as they’ve gone down that rabbit hole, but I do wonder if it’s related to the perceived loss of the reading public. It’s interesting that White noted this as being a small-press concern, because small presses are ways to cater to a more specific (and perhaps limited) readership. If I believe the public at large won’t read what I’m writing, I’m going to write toward a specific audience. It seems like pod-groups have formed, where small groups of readers become interested in a particular thing — be it language poetry or flash fiction or White’s new minimalism — and a kind of positive feedback occurs: “We understand what we’re doing, and we’re going to do more of it, which only we’ll understand.”

That’s my take, at least, that writers are losing a certain ambition. What really concerns me here is that for writing to mean anything, I think, other than some selfish, navel-gazing pursuit, you have to fight against that nihilistic impulse, the idea that nobody’s going to read us anyway so we might as well write for each other and forget the rest of the world. I’m seeing this in the marketing world. Mobile ads and emails are being directed to targeted demographics. We’re all forming consumerist groups, exemplified by the Facebook “like.” Arguably, the marketing model for the 20th century was “let’s create products that people don’t need and convince them to buy-buy-buy,” and in the process we became hamsters running the wheel of the economy. The marketing model for the 21st century is going to be, “let’s create pod-group experiences for people to reassure them that all is well” — the net result being we still buy-buy-buy, we’re still hamsters on wheels. That’s kind of how I view language poets and other writers who have gone down the rabbit hole. They’ve accepted the pod-group reality, and are either content or — worse — believe they’re somehow doing something important.

This week I finished White and Seay’s anthology of contemporary Appalachian short stories. It seems like Appalachian literature has been a distinct — genre? school? — but lately the region has garnered some much deserved attention for producing literature of merit, literature that captures the place, the community, and the language of Appalachia as distinct from the more general “southern literature.” I’m not much of an authority, but for interested blog readers it seems the history of recent Appalachian literature begins with the godmother, Harriette Arnow, then includes James Still, Jesse Stuart, and Jim Wayne Miller, who have passed, and the living elders, Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, and Wendell Berry. Today the journal Appalachian Heritage is one of the best resources for the region, and they’ve assembled something of a canon here.

Degrees of Elevation picks up with the current generation, and provides a good survey of tomorrow’s regional elders. White and Seay have paired writers who have achieved wide acclaim outside the region — Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Silas House — with up-and-comers, including terrific stories by my friends Mark Powell and Denton Loving. In the introduction, the editors say, “We do not believe any one view of Appalachia is a Truth entire,” but I still think the collection has some unity, which I think reflects the region. There’s a Naturalistic vein here; many of these characters are experiencing hard times that stem from circumstances (often economic) beyond their control. But rather than come off as victims, these characters shake their fists at those forces and do what they can, even when it’s in vain.

I’m glad this anthology has been put together. Interested readers might also keep an eye out for a possible companion piece, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. III, which focuses on contemporary Appalachian poetry and was published this month.

My favorite economist has a new ebook, The Great Stagnation, reviewed here by Eli Dourado. I haven’t read the book, but here are some choice sentences from the review:

The esoteric meaning, though, is clear: the parts of the economy—the internet and our interiority—that are most free from government intervention are awesome. We can expand these sectors, and indeed liberate others, but it will require repudiating the debt and the status quo.

Cowen has been taking to task what he refers to as “zero marginal product workers” (see this and this) and the reviewer hints that our entire system is broken because of efforts to prop up the status quo. (And boo on tea partiers as much as boo on Republicans and Democrats.) Cowen also sees technological innovation on the way, which will disrupt a lot of things (a clearing of the house) but which will create a lot of economic growth. His blog isn’t called Marginal Revolution for nothing.

This is the first novel of Updike’s that I’ve read, and I thought it was terrific. The story introduces Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a 26-year-old salesman living in a medium-sized Pennsylvania city. He’s got a wife, one kid and another on the way, when one day he has a moment of crisis and runs out on his family and moves in with part-time prostitute. Since this is set in the late-’50s, that’s a dangerous move for a man to make.

To be honest, there’s a lot not to like here, and I’m not sure I would recommend the book to everyone. Rabbit is kind of a jerk, and the misogyny of the time shines forth. There are plenty of sex scenes for those of you with reptilian minds, and though they didn’t bother me I think if you pulled some of that prose out by itself it would look pretty bad. That said, the prose here overall is really engaging and interesting. Updike has a vigorous syntax, and he pays careful attention to the language he uses. I know James Wood and John Gardner have accused him of having a mannered style, but it really sucked me into the story.

I think it’s also a case of me reading the book at the right time. Rabbit is a couple of years younger than I am, but he’s a life step ahead of me in terms of having a kid. But the main crisis seems to be about his move into adult responsibilities. He was a high school basketball star, and in the opening scene he plays a game with some kids. He thinks about how there’s always a younger generation pushing you upward and out: The kids haven’t “forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.” He’s an adult but isn’t ready to accept those responsibilities; thus, he runs. I’m barreling toward 30 and realizing every day, God I’m not a kid anymore. I feel you, Rabbit, even if you are a jerk.

This is a quick, fun, hard-boiled novel about a dude, Roy Cady, who works as some hired muscle for some gangster-types in New Orleans. When his boss tries to have him killed, Cady hits the road with this 18-year-old would-be prostitute he saved from some hitmen. They cruise west into Texas to hide out, but the danger is only a few steps behind them. You can read this novel in an afternoon, so I’m not sure I’d pay the $25 for the hardcover edition, but it’s definitely worth checking out of the library if you like this kind of narrative — gruesome, masculine, punchy noir. I’d also check out Dennis Lehane’s review in the NY Times, because he has some interesting comments about the genre. (Might not want to read the review until you’ve read the novel, because there’s only so much you can say without spoiling everything.)

Davidson is a Purdue alum (from somewhere in the late ’90s or early ’00s) and I think this book started as his thesis. I enjoyed this collection. He’s writing in the realist tradition of Carver, and like Carver he writes about down-on-their-luck ordinary people — an inventory worker for a software company, a biology teacher, a maintenance man, a vacuum cleaner salesman. The strongest stories here deal with the work people do and how that work reflects their inner lives.

Another strength here is that the characters feel very Midwestern, in that they maintain a certain amount of privacy about their inner lives. There’s a holding back, a kind of reserve, which in itself creates a kind of tension. One of the stranger stories is “The Hillside Slasher,” in which the narrator confesses to a crime years after the fact. The story is told in the form of a letter, and the form illustrates what I’m getting at. The narrator and his wife play a game where they reveal secrets to each other, and even after years of marriage there are still looming secrets. This idea of confessing, of holding secrets, seems like a major obsession of this collection.