Friday, November 14, 2014

the last book I ever read (Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories by Tony Earley, excerpt two)

from Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories by Tony Earley:

In 1975, when Rose turned twenty, married Fieldlin Kohler, and moved to the farm, Argyle, the nearest town, had seemed to be as close as one could get to the end of the earth and still have access to a grocery store. That was why Fieldlin had bought it. He had been Rose’s painting teacher at the small state college in Georgia onto whose campus she had wandered after graduating from high school. He was an emaciated praying mantis of a man who stuffed the legs of his paint-spattered chinos into knee-high fringed moccasins. He pulled his thinning gray hair back into a greasy ponytail, and wore vaguely piratical linen blouses whose sleeves billowed when he waved his arms. In class, he paced and chain-smoked while ranting about the soullessness of American art, and routinely offered beer and gas money to any student who would drive to Pennsylvania and personally shoot Andrew Wyeth.



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