Junk Shop Window: Essays on Myth, Life, and Literature

by James J. Patterson

Overview

In the world of Junk Shop Window, nothing is quite what it seems. A visit to the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere, England, results in a meeting with a telepathic dog. A trip to see the Irish Rovers on St. Patrick’s Day becomes slapstick worthy of the I Love Lucy show. An attempt to record the right background sounds for a Sherlock Holmes radio play opens a doorway in time to the world of a century ago. And Hermes, the messenger god, appears in various guises, relaying sometimes cryptic, sometime life-saving messages. In these pages, Patterson offers us a curiosity shop of the mind, in which everyday encounters yield unexpected gems. Seen through this author’s eyes, our contemporary world is full of portals into myth and history, leading to serious questions about the nature of time itself. Add a little alchemy, a dash of metaphysics, some scholarship, and some well-earned humor, and you’re inside Junk Shop Window, where every experience gleams with insight, and the world is at once more strange and more deeply beautiful than you ever knew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942892342
Publisher:	Santa Fe Writer's Project
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

James J. Patterson is a keen student of history, literary and otherwise. An autodidact, his role models are the medieval goliards, traveling musicians who wandered from town to town, gathering insights and experiences to retell in stories and songs. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland. 

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Roughnecks:

"One of the welcome treats from the emergence of James J. Patterson’s fiction is his penchant for setting his stories in the real America, the part of our country that gets too little notice by either the factual or the fictional media stars. He’s a welcome addition to the stories of our times." —James Grady, author of This Train and Six Days of the Condor

"By turns magical and moving, immense and tragic, Roughnecks maps a rugged geography of the human condition, as seen through the eyes of the hard-bitten Zak Harper. It’s not hard to see Cormac McCarthy in its clean and blunt dialogue or James Dickey in the depth of its prose, yet there is something here that goes beyond what even McCarthy or Dickey challenged readers to do – that is to care deeply about a character not because they like or even hate him, but because they understand him and are therefore compelled to follow him." —James Mathews, author of Last Known Position
 

Praise for Bermuda Shorts:

"Lovers of the personal essay should be rejoicing in the streets at the publication of Bermuda Shorts. Whether he’s writing on politics, culture, sports, or the arts, James J. Patterson’s work is full of an endangered resource – the magnificent, apparently inexhaustible fund of sheer energy that springs from every page." —Rick Walter, former LA Times writer

 

"Happily, early on, James J. Patterson discovered that the bumpy road through life was lined with books. Clearly, somewhere along the way he pulled out a volume of Montaigne. The young 20th century rebel must have found much to admire in the French Renaissance thinker’s essays, and especially the meaning of the word essayer, to try – both as a philosophy of living and as a style for writing. The essays in Patterson’s delightful volume, Bermuda Shorts, highlight the ways in which life and literature intertwine. And, like the 16th century master, Patterson makes this literary form his own invention." —Joanna Biggar, author of That Paris Year and Melanie’s Song

 

"Some of the essays are the literary equivalent of the Buddhist meditation on the skull, which is meant to use the sense of impending death as an impetus to love the juicy, impermanent life at hand." — Katherine Williams, author of Still Life (poems)

 

"Like sitting down with a very intelligent friend and having the kind of conversation you’d always wanted to have." — Myra Sklarew, author of A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania

From the Publisher