The Eye You See With

November 18, 2019
Novelist Bell (Behind the Moon) presents a sterling collection of essays on literature, culture, politics, and war by the late Stone (1937–2015), best known for his National Book Award–winning novel Dog Soldiers. Spanning the 1970s to the aughts, the essays demonstrate Stone’s remarkable capacity for capturing an era’s ethos while making larger, and still current, points. His 1993 essay “Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You” blasts the hypocrisy of the armed forces in discharging gay service members but not preventing the sexual harassment and assault of female personnel. In “The Reason for Stories,” Stone argues that art, and storytelling in particular, is inherently moral in its implications. The standout selection is “Keeping the Future at Bay,” on the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. It’s a nuanced piece which addresses the issue of gentrification, steeped in Stone’s personal reminiscence of selling encyclopedias door-to-door in the city in the ’60s. Throughout, Bell provides useful biographical information, which in combination with the essays provides a vivid portrait of Stone’s background and guiding philosophy. Fans of Stone’s novels will especially appreciate the insight, but any reader of narrative nonfiction will find plenty of interest in this fine collection. Agent: Neil Olson, Massie & McQuilken.

March 15, 2020
This first collection of Stone's nonfiction, edited by his biographer, Madison Smartt Bell, brings together essays written for a variety of periodicals?the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone, among them?and showcases the same dizzying welter of ideas and passions that defines Stone's landmark fiction. Bell divides the pieces into three sections that reveal the sweep of Stone's occasional journalism: "The Red Sea," writings on war, including a perceptive introduction to The Red Badge of Courage and thought-provoking musings on Vietnam ("a mistake ten thousand miles long") and 9/11 ("the violent assault of one narrative system upon another"); "Disruption," about social upheaval from the sixties forward, featuring two striking remembrances of Ken Kesey ("he always had this sense of doing something as setting forth"); and "The Heart of the Strange Story," richly philosophical reflections on the art of fiction. In "What Fiction Is For," he says that "art is the only medium we have for removing a moment from the whirl of events and placing it under scrutiny in all its dimensions." These essays, however, argue persuasively that, for Stone, nonfiction can do the same thing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)