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Paperback Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers Book

ISBN: 057836221X

ISBN13: 9780578362212

Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers

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Format: Paperback

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Book Overview

Novelist Donald Newlove (1928-2021) contemplates how alcoholism has affected the lives and work of other writers, as well as himself.


". . . a passionate blend: part autobiography, part confessional, part sketches of famous alcoholic writers and part sermon on the dangers of 'Drunkspeare' . . . its bird song and purling ravishment, bliss of self-love. . . . Like improvisational jazz . . . the Newlove sound is robust and swinging, the mark of a man who has discovered that his talent is intoxication enough."

- R.Z. Sheppard, Time


"Newlove's memoir makes The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson seem like a dull college weekend. It is, quite simply, terrifying, a tale to chill the blood of anyone who's ever hoisted a drink in a bar. It is a book with both literary merit and social value of the most redeeming sort imaginable."

- Judson Hand, New York Daily News


"Those Drinking Days ought to be read. It is an astonishing, moving memoir."

- Joel Oppenheimer, New York Times

Customer Reviews

3 ratings

Two livers up

I've spent most of the second half of my life looking for Donald Newlove. Is he dead? Is he alive? I have no idea. I only know that this book affected me profoundly when I was a blossoming writer, with grandiose ideas about the craft and about the crazy nuance of excess. No other writer tells a tale of drunken ego like Newlove, I think, because none can exert this kind of self-flaggellating honesty. A masterful, beautiful book that looks closely at all the great, drunken writers with the trained eye of one who has suffered of the same spirits. It should appeal to anyone who writes, drinks or, more likely, both.

Best Read by the Sea

I loaned this book to Jonny Mac in Boston, and he never gave it back. This book explores the self-destruction which is so attractive to so many writers, such as Dylan Thomas in his little cottage by the sea. Inversely, it seems to exert a pull on those who are in mid-binge phase, hoping that the self-destruction will make them better writers. Which always sounds like someone saying that developing ulcers and colitis to be more like John Calvin, will make them a better theologian. The author shook himself loose from this thinking, but not until it almost killed him. If Mac gives me the book back some day, I'd like to read it again. John, it's been what, since 1982 or so? Are you done yet?

Fascinating history of this and other alcoholic writers

There have been countless books and plays about alcoholic characters, many of them writers, but less works about the writers themselves. The first half of the book is an autobiography of Newlove from his sloshed life. The second half profiles an array of great alcoholic (or at least near alcoholic) writers (Faulkner, Capote, Fitzgerald, etc). Unfortunately out of print, I still remember this one pretty vividly from about 20 years ago when it came out.
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