Clippings – Page 2 – James McGirk

March 15, 2014June 3, 2014

Confidence in Culture

New work in the March 15, 2014 issue of This Land

December 13, 2013June 3, 2014

The State that Oil Built

Cover of Dec. 1, 2013 THIS LAND — Find my latest article on newsstands today!

September 30, 2013June 3, 2014

When the Rodeo Clowns Came

I live surrounded by retirees in rural Oklahoma. They are spry. They own arsenals of gardening equipment: lawnmower-tractor hybrids that grind through the fibrous local flora with cruel efficiency; they wield wicked contraptions, whirling motorized blades that allow withered men to sculpt hedges into forms of sublime and delectable complexity.

September 16, 2013June 3, 2014

On Bohemian Life in the Sooner State

HOMEWARD BOUND: Tahlequah via Brooklyn: James McGirk writes notes from a screened-in porch in a city that sleeps.

August 5, 2013June 3, 2014

Destination Oklahoma: Route 66

What you really need to live here is a truck. Maybe not in the cities, but out here, in the foothills of the Ozarks, where the roads flood when the creek overflows its banks, and even traversing a parking lot means tumbling into tooth shattering ruts and axle scraping bumps: you do.

July 16, 2013June 3, 2014

The Cheat Code to Life

Sneaky tricks, workarounds, and creative rule-bending to outwit the chumps and get what you want.

(My stories are Reddit Pizza scamming, and apocalypse cheats)

July 8, 2013June 3, 2014

The Great Spy’s Dream

I asked Patrick if there was anything particularly useful he could pass on to me “about the CIA.” “The first thing to remember is that nobody connected to the Agency calls it the CIA. It’s plain CIA.”

—Harry Mathews, My Life in CIA.

June 13, 2013June 3, 2014

The Splashy Debut Novel is Dead—Or Is It?

Are the big publishing houses using independent presses as a farm league to scout for talent, and exiting the market for big-gamble debuts? James McGirk reports.

June 10, 2013June 3, 2014

The Metropolitan Trilogy

After writing a spate of reasonably successful—and very autobiographical—novels, James Ellroy and Martin Amis took the cities surrounding them and used them as test beds, experimenting with new voices and forms and populating this familiar terrain with doppelgangers and villains and foils and sexual obsessions.