I have just finished reading Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer, by Chuck Thompson. The title lived up to its promise. In its own way, it's a kind of contemporary classic, actually. It's that good. Chuck's that good.
Most days, the closest you get to The Truth is a morsel of Bukowski, but he's long dead and no longer churns out his line. Where are the other keepers of veracity? The raw and uncut verbal pranksters? The tell-it-as-nobody-dare, no-bullshit players? I had all but despaired until I chanced upon the writing of the man referred to at the head of this blog.
Chuck gives us the dirt on the travel industry and travel writing in general. But he's more than that. Some of his stories are object lessons for life, some are amusing (meaning that they are laugh-out-loud vignettes), and some are so fantastic that they leap into your long-term memory, never to leave as long as you are extant.
His whole style of his writing reminds you just how inept most wordsmiths are when they go fishing for a metaphor. Chuck Thompson has no such impediment: he reels in scores of apt phrases like fat Alaskan salmon. (Mr Thompson came of age in the northern town of Juneau.)
Read Chuck Thompson. Now.
Alias: Frank Satyr
Most days, the closest you get to The Truth is a morsel of Bukowski, but he's long dead and no longer churns out his line. Where are the other keepers of veracity? The raw and uncut verbal pranksters? The tell-it-as-nobody-dare, no-bullshit players? I had all but despaired until I chanced upon the writing of the man referred to at the head of this blog.
Chuck gives us the dirt on the travel industry and travel writing in general. But he's more than that. Some of his stories are object lessons for life, some are amusing (meaning that they are laugh-out-loud vignettes), and some are so fantastic that they leap into your long-term memory, never to leave as long as you are extant.
His whole style of his writing reminds you just how inept most wordsmiths are when they go fishing for a metaphor. Chuck Thompson has no such impediment: he reels in scores of apt phrases like fat Alaskan salmon. (Mr Thompson came of age in the northern town of Juneau.)
Read Chuck Thompson. Now.
Alias: Frank Satyr
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