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Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany Hardcover – October 1, 2012

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Charles Portis (Author)
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Charles Portis (Author), Jay Jennings (Editor)
4.7 out of 5 stars 35 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 380 pages
  • Publisher: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies; First edition (October 1, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1935106503
  • ISBN-13: 978-1935106500
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #942,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsPortis in one place
By T. BAXTER on September 28, 2012
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Charles Portis is perhaps our best-known unknown writer. I happen to think he ranks with Mark Twain as one of the greatest comedic writers America has ever produced. Like the editor of this collection, I too have tucked into a folder every bit of Portis' non-novelistic output that I've been able to find here and there over the years. It's great to have it now all packed into one tight volume. "Combinations of Jacksons" alone is worth the price of the book.
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5.0 out of 5 starsNice Intro to the Work of An American Comic Genius
By R. P. Warren on October 4, 2012
Format: Hardcover
It's been two decades since we got a peek into the fictional world of Charles Portis, the author of "True Grit" and four other highly acclaimed novels. But his new book "Escape Velocity" fills the gap nicely. The book brings together in one place almost everything that Portis has written outside the novels, both never-before-published work and hard-to-find stories that fans have known about for years and that new readers will delight in discovering.
The book also contains a full-length, three-act play, "Delmar's New Moon", previously unpublished, which shows off Portis's trademark dead-pan style. Especially interesting are the non-fiction pieces, including some he wrote for newspapers during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and a long essay, "Combinations of Jacksons". These early pieces show the writing style that later shaped his fiction.
This is a must-have book for Portis fans and a thoughtful introduction for those new to the work of Charles Portis.
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5.0 out of 5 starsWhat a find!
By DCSusan on October 17, 2012
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Here is all the Portis miscellany collected in one book! I cannot say how happy I was to receive it. I immediately went and pitched out magazines and files with articles written by and about Portis, for now I have everything in one place. Thank you Jay Jennings and the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies for this splendid collection. For those who have loved the 5 novels of Charles Portis and wished for more of Portis' works, here it is. The book even has something new in the play "Delray's New Moon."
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5.0 out of 5 starsPriceless Portis
By T. ORourke on February 23, 2014
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
An absolute must for any fan. It is hard to describe, but the man cannot be uninteresting. This includes almost everything the editor could find, and it is all worth it. His reporting on the racial struggles and desegregation in the south is unforgettable - he has led quite a life. Thank you for going to all the trouble to put this together for us. I only wish it were 1000+ pages. When I get back home I am rereading my collection again starting with my favorite, Dog of the South.
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5.0 out of 5 starsIndispensable addition to the canon of an American master
By Chris C. Hill on September 9, 2015
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
As of 2015 Charles Portis is best known for his comic-tragic novel True Grit. Mattie Ross, the lady with grit, has a voice that, once read, is unlikely ever to be forgotten. The novel uses period language (and thought patterns) to distill something distinctively American and as pertinent to the current state of our Union as it is/was to the American "southwest" of the 1870s,

Yet it would be a mistake to equate Mr. Portis's range of diction with Mattie's. In fact, he is a true post-modern author, with a palette of available voices -- many richly southwestern -- that mix irony, sharp observation, and emblems of unfulfilled sincerity in ways different from the good and great eastern, southern, mid-western, or western American writers I've read. His closest antecedent is perhaps Thornton Wilder in Heaven's My Destination, though the two writers could hardly be mistaken for one another.

The generous anthology Escape Velocity allows us to observe Mr. Portis writing in several habitats. His is a flexible yet recognizable craft. He was a newsman first, and on the evidence here one who did not shrink from covering the difficult subjects of his era, including the Civil Rights movement. Even the earliest reportage gathered here, three pieces on the death of Elvis Presley's mother, aims for something that pierces the veil of appearance, not to mention PR. A few years later Mr. Portis quit a distinguished career with the New York Herald Tribune in London just as soon as he was sure he was ready to to write fiction.

While True Grit is, thanks to Hollywood, his best known story, in the world of fiction Mr. Portis is no one-hit wonder. Many acquainted with his other four published novels think at least one or two of them even better than True Grit.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsAn appreciation for a unique talent
By Trevor Seigler on December 18, 2014
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
In the world of Charles Portis' fiction, odd characters are a given, indeed a necessity. You wonder where he got the inspiration for some of those people. Now, thanks to "Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany," you get some sense of an answer: from the very people that Portis was around, either as a reporter or in some other function.

The pieces in this collection go a long way towards making the case that Portis is one of the great men of letters in American literature post-1945, with a keen ear for sayings and characters that most other people might miss (or dismiss) entirely. The non-fiction pieces in particular are revelatory: Portis earned his stripes as a journalist, and here we see him covering the death of Elvis' mother while picking up on the nuances of the moment (how Elvis had to balance his private grief with his public obligations, not just to his fans but to the Army into which he was drafted). I was hesitant about the short fiction pieces: Portis' novels contain such fantastical moments that often times they need the space that a novel provides to give them weight, and I worried that short fiction might reveal the man behind the curtain, in a sense, as not being the same at the great novelist whose works I'd read and enjoyed previously. But not to fret: the short fiction, while not being up to the same standards as his longform work, is sparkling with intelligence and wit. I did skip over the play included in this volume, however (I do plan to return to it some day), as well as the long interview towards the end. I wanted to save some Portis for another day, as I've read all his novels and didn't want to necessarily come to the end of his published work.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Excellent.

Published 2 months ago by Bruce C Davis
5.0 out of 5 stars" one of the funniest and most perfect pieces of writing I've ever...

Lots of gems in here, but I gave it five stars for Portis's essay "An Auto Odyssey through Darkest Baja," one of the funniest and most perfect pieces of writing I've ever... Read more

Published 5 months ago by T. Hover
5.0 out of 5 starsTop Notch

Portis, author of Norwood and True Grit, is a national treasure. This delightful collection confirms his great talent.

Published 5 months ago by oleaginous
5.0 out of 5 starsI love Charles Portis!

Excellent review of Portis' career. I really liked this book. I purchased two, one for me , one for a gift to some lucky person. Price was good.

Published 15 months ago by flem j connell
5.0 out of 5 starsA Must Read For Portis Fans

I've read all of Charles Portis' books, and was therefore pleased to find this additional material. Not only is the reader treated to the author's unique first person voice, he... Read more

Published 17 months ago by Luckydawg
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great copy.

Published 19 months ago by Xavi
4.0 out of 5 starsA lot of very good stuff here

I never knew much about Portis' career. A lot of very good stuff here, mostly solid, simple reporting on the newspaper articles, and the bits of fiction were typically subtle,... Read more

Published 21 months ago by MotoJoe
5.0 out of 5 starsBook.

Hell of a thing. Read it.

Published 23 months ago by Kaleb Horton
5.0 out of 5 starsUnique American Treasure

There is no one like Charles Portis in American letters.
He wrote five novels, all of which are revered in different orders of preference by his ardent fans. Read more

Published on August 11, 2014 by fov books
4.0 out of 5 starsCharles Portis revealed--somewhat.

Charles Portis has always had a small group of fans but after the early success of True Grit, most of the reading public lost track of him. Read more

Published on July 14, 2014 by D. Ashbaugh

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