Last weekend I read Norwood by Charles Portis on a Peter Pan Bus from NYC to Northampton, Massachusetts. Tremendously funny and sharp, a pre-cursor to the Coen Brothers. And not just hee-haw, but vivid to the point of effortless grace: one man is described as “holding out his tongue like he was waiting for a coin.” Everyone in Norwood is breezy and distinct, even the people “driving the conflict,” which makes it kind of avant-garde, right? For one or two sentence characterization and all-around deft awesomeness, I’ve not read much better recently than Charles Portis. Why is this post a snippet? Because Ed Park already wrote an awesome essay about Portis. Now let’s all read everything Portis has written and gab about it.

In celebration of the paperback release of his latest novel Castle, the excellent J. Robert Lennon is giving away iPad and PDF versions of his Video Game Hints, Tricks, And Cheats: Essays, Exercises, Riffs, Gags, And Other Incidental Writings, “a collection of random, mostly comic writing from the past dozen years, including pieces published in Harper’s, Granta, The Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.”