Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany

· RB Media · Narrated by Susan Bennett and T. Ryder Smith
Audiobook
14 hr 6 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

Best known for his glorious comic novels—including the American classic True Grit—Charles Portis was also a prolific essayist, travel writer, and newspaper reporter. Now, for the first time, these writings—journalism, short fiction,
memoir, travel stories, and even a play—have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. The collection encompasses the breadth of Portis’s fifty-year writing career, covering topics as varied as road tripping in Baja,
Elvis’s visits to his aging mother, and his own boyhood in Arkansas. Also included in Escape Velocity are Portis’s three-act play Delray’s New Moon, “Damn!” a rare short story from 1957, and tributes by Donna Tartt, Wells Tower, Ron Rosenbaum,
Ed Park, and Roy Blount Jr. While fans of Charles Portis’s sly and distinctive humor, quirky characters, and keen ear for detail will be thrilled at this new addition to their libraries, Escape Velocity will also serve as an essential introduction to those not yet familiar with his work.

About the author

Charles Portis lives in Arkansas, where he was born (1933) and educated. Portis served as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and was also its London bureau chief. His first novel, Norwood, was published in 1966. His other novels are True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos. True Grit has been made into a movie two times, once in 1969 with John Wayne (who won his only academy award by playing the main character of Rooster Cogburn), and a second time in 2010 with Jeff Bridges as the main character. Mr. Bridges was nominated for the Rooster Cogburn role, but did not win. Charles Portis died on February 17, 2020 in Little Rock, Arkansas at age 86. He had been under hospice care for two years.

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