Great notice today of Overlook's triumphant reissue of
Charles Portis' True Grit, with a foreward by Ms. Donna Tartt on Papercuts, Dwight Garner's New York Times Book Blog:
Last week, when I posted some samples of Eliot Fremont-Smith’s memorable reviews from the mid-1960s, there was one I forgot – his piece on Charles Portis’s 1968 masterpiece “True Grit.” Fremont-Smith effortlessly nailed the book’s breathless comic tone:
True Grit is when you are a 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, and you’ve just shot a dangerous outlaw and the gun’s recoil has sent you backward into a pit, and you are wedged in the pit and sinking fast into the cave below where bats are brushing against your legs, and you reach out for something to hold on to and find a rotting corpse beside you and it’s full of angry rattlers, and then it turns out you didn’t kill the outlaw, he’s up at the rim of the pit laughing at you, about to shoot you – and you don’t lose your nerve. That’s True Grit.
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