Blurbs

“J. C. Hallman has written his best, funniest, and riskiest book, one that flirts deliciously at the edge of obnoxiousness before darting off into deeper, sager truths. Every writer or would-be writer will find much to relish, wince at and identify with here.” Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside my Head, Essays

“J. C. Hallman’s B & Me is a daring book.  Its ostensible subject is the virtuosic and uncategorizable writer Nicholson Baker, but Hallman, borrowing a page from Baker’s book on John Updike, U and I, transforms appreciation into autobiography.  The fact that Baker has already played this trick only raises the stakes for Hallman: what can he say about Baker that Baker hasn’t said about Updike?  But the fact of the matter is that Hallman pulls it off.  He reads Baker brilliantly and compellingly, and at the same time, he tells a moving personal story, about love and fame, envy and admiration, which says as much about what it’s like to be a writer now as U and I ever said about the writing world of the 1970s and ’80s.”  Paul La Farge, author of Haussman, or the Distinction