Willy
Vlautin
| A Jockey's Christmas |
Willy
Vlautin A Jockey’s Christmas Irish Release December 5th 2008 via Shellshock www.willyvlautin.com ~ www.richmondfontaine.com *
1st spoken word album from Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine |
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A
Jockey’s Christmas is Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine’s first spoken word album
backed with musical accompaniment. A Jockey’s Christmas is a
dark comedy about JD, a misfit, overweight, alcoholic jockey whose
career has dried up. JD spends more time betting and boozing then
he does preparing for the track. The story chronicles his adventures
on a journey home to Reno to spend Christmas with his family told
in seven chapters. The album ends with two songs “The
Track” and “The Fifth Race” written about the same race but told from different perspectives.
Willy has been a long time fan of the horse tracks and earlier this
year bought his own horse. Sadly things didn’t work out and
he was thrown from the horse which left Willy with a broken arm and
in bed for over a month….damn horses. Willy released his second novel “Northline” with it’s own cd soundtrack at the beginning of this year which again received as much attention as his first novel “The Motel Life”. Just recently, film writer-director Courtney Hunt has signed on to write and direct “Nortline” has set her next project. Hunt won a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January for her working-class drama "Frozen River. Vlautin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, The Motel Life (2007), won the Nevada Silver Pen Award and also has been shortlisted for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. Willy Vlautin | The Motel Life (2007) “…mournful, understated and proudly steeped in menthol smoke and bourbon. Slighter than Carver, less puerile than Bukowski, Vlautin nevertheless manages to lay claim to the same bleary-eyed territory, and surprisingly — perhaps even unintentionally — to make it new.” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “A hugely compassionate, wildly original road movie of a novel” ESQUIRE “The work of a careful and conscientious writer… Vlautin, like his musical equivalents Tom Waits and Shane MacGowan, manages to render pathos without sentimentality in prose whose tone is downbeat, fatalistic and hangdog.” HOT PRESS Willy Vlautin | Northline (2008) “Quiet, sad and suffused with a melancholic serenity, it begs to be read” SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “Vlautin’s Northline is a wrenching and realistic novel that Velcros itself into the memory like a mournful country tune… Northline heralds the emergence of a major realist talent” SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER “... a mournful and compelling story of working-class lives in Las Vegas and Reno… Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff come to mind rather than Nick Cave, which isn’t to knock Nick Cave, only to say that Vlautin has a literary voice that feels more grounded.” LA TIMES On Willy Vlautin “Vlautin… is nothing less than the Dylan of the dislocated” THE INDEPENDENT “This guy writes like the secret love child of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor—just plain, true, tough, irony-free, heartrending American fiction about people living in the third-world sections of our country.” MICHAEL GRUBER “Vlautin is becoming one of America’s most fundamental artists in words and music” MOJO |
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