June 3, 2009 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Reading About Novelist James Jones

Jun 03 2009

I have been reading the galleys of a memoir that will come out in September. It is a book that has nothing to do with the Peace Corps, and was written by Kaylie Jones, the daughter of the novelist James Jones. You might have seen the movie made of her first book, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries which starred Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey. This book is again about her famous father, and their early life together. Jones died when she was 16. However, what interests me is when he was writing his first and most famous novel, From Here to Eternity. This is a great war novel (you have seen the very good movie of it, I’m sure) and with The Naked And The Dead, the two best books (plus, of course, Catch 22) about WWII. Anyway, I read both of these novels when I was a teenager and while the prose is not perfect (unlike . . .

RPCV Matt Davis From Mongolia Writes Memoir of Peace Corps Days

Jun 03 2009

Matt Davis (Mongolia 2000-02) stayed in-country for a year after his Peace Corps tour, then returned home and found his way to Iowa’s famous writing program where in 2007 he earned an MFA in non-fiction. Matt recently sold his first book When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale to St. Martin’s Press. The book, he says, “is in large measure a memoir of my time as a PCV in the Mongolian countryside.” There is no firm publication date set, though it looks like the book will come out in early 2010. Davis now is working on revisions and fact checking and living in Washington, D.C. and getting another masters, this time at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in DC. After finishing his MFA in the writing program at Iowa he had a fellowship where he worked for the International Writing Program in Iowa City. It was during this period that he became interested in the idea of cultural . . .

Archive - June 3, 2009