Contemporary Authors

• Dear Mr. President Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2002
• Gork, the Teenage Dragon Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2017

1. Gork, the teenage dragon LCCN 2017004831 Type of material Book Personal name Hudson, Gabe, author. Main title Gork, the teenage dragon / Gabe Hudson. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Description 380 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780375413964 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3608.U345 G67 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Dear Mr. President : precision-guided propaganda for the human animals LCCN 2004541044 Type of material Book Personal name Hudson, Gabe. Main title Dear Mr. President : precision-guided propaganda for the human animals / by Gabe Hudson. Edition 1st Vintage Contemporaries ed. Published/Created New York : Vintage Books, 2003, c2002. Description 155 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 0375713409 (pbk.) Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bios/random056/2004541044.html Sample text http://www.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random051/2004541044.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/random052/2004541044.html CALL NUMBER PS3608.U345 D43 2003 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. Dear Mr. President LCCN 2002020812 Type of material Book Personal name Hudson, Gabe. Main title Dear Mr. President / Gabe Hudson. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Description 155 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0375413952 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bios/random054/2002020812.html Sample text http://www.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random043/2002020812.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/random046/2002020812.html CALL NUMBER PS3608.U345 D43 2002 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Rolling Stone - http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/gabe-hudson-debut-novel-gork-the-teenage-dragon-w492503

  QUOTE:
  hilarious
  less Game of Thrones and more The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with fire-breathing characters and a John Hughes-esque plot.

  From Marine Corps to Teenage Dragons: How Gabe Hudson Finally Wrote His Debut Novel
  After his surreal satire of the Gulf War, 'Dear Mr. President,' the award-winning author returns with something unexpected: a dragon coming-of-age novel

  Gabe Hudson published his Gulf War satire, 'Dear Mr. President,' 15 years ago and now returns with a novel about a teenage dragon named Gork. Linda Peters
  By Lincoln Michel
  July 17, 2017
  Gork is a dragon, but not the kind you might be familiar with from HBO's blockbuster TV show. "Not only are your reports about us dragons wildly inaccurate, they are downright insensitive and repugnant," Gork tells the reader. For example, Beowulf is "nothing but a pack of slanderous lie about my kind, written by a bum poet who didn't have the gumption to sign his own name to the book."

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  In Gabe Hudson's hilarious debut novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon, dragons are not mythic earth creatures but a terrifying extraterrestrial species hell-bent on conquering the universe with help of their cyborg slaves and talking spaceships. Then again, some dragons, like Gork, are sensitive souls with puny horns and Will to Power ratings of a mere "Snackalicious" who are more at home reciting poetry than incinerating new species. Gork is less Game of Thrones and more The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with fire-breathing characters and a John Hughes-esque plot.

  Fifteen years ago, Hudson's Gulf War satire Dear Mr. President made about as big of a splash as a story collection can make. Hudson was included in the New Yorker's 2001 debut fiction issue – with Jonathan Safran Foer and Nell Freudenberger – and then in Granta's Best Young American Novelists list in 2007, alongside Foer and Freudenberger again, as well as Karen Russell, Yiyun Li and Anthony Doerr, among others. Then, from the perspective of the literary world at least, he disappeared.

  "I wrote so much. And just flailed. Fumbled. Whatever verb," Hudson tells Rolling Stone when we meet in the tiny backyard of a downtown New York City bar. "Just making a mess of thing, not gaining any trajectory, any velocity." Writers are famous for having issues with a second book, and even a 15-year gap is not unusual. In Hudson's case, he had both the the pressure of being anointed by the the literary establishment as well as the expectations to stay in a box he didn’t want to stay in.

  "[The publishing industry] wanted a Gulf War novel, because I had sort of done that the first time. But by that time everybody was talking about Iraq and it was completely boring to me," he explains. "I wasn't interested in cementing that identity." After floundering for years and "hitting rock bottom," Hudson says he heard the voice of Gork and "wrote out of joy."

  Hudson grew up in North Carolina and Texas. Then, after graduating from UT-Austin, he decided to join the Marines. "I think I was probably depressed actually and just didn't know it," Hudson says. "I'd been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy; Blood Meridian was my favorite book for a long time. And I was like, you need to get out of this soft, white whatever you're in and have an adventure while you're young."

  When he went to the recruiting office, they seemed taken aback. He had good grades, so said they could get him working on computers. "I want to be a grunt, like I read about," Hudson told them, to which they replied. "Really? It's the worst!" But Hudson persisted, and he was thrown into a very different world: "Next thing I knew, everybody was different. All different ethnicities, and hybrid ethnicities, different walks of life, and tattoos just out the wazoo." This new environment taught Hudson to be "more compassionate and loving of different kinds of people" – even while the Marines were instructing him "how to sneak up on somebody with a knife."

  After serving as a rifleman in the Marine Reserves, Hudson entered the MFA program at Brown University, a famously experimental program headed by Robert Coover. Near the end of his time there, Hudson heard about McSweeney's, the then-in-its-infancy project of Dave Eggers. "McSweeney's popped up out of nowhere, and it seemed like a revolution. You could be funny, weird, all this stuff."

  Early issues of McSweeney's quarterlies combined the era's emerging icons (David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson) with new authors who would soon cement their status in the literary world (George Saunders, Heidi Julavits, Ben Marcus, Zadie Smith). In a literary culture of staid lit mags publishing seemingly endless Raymond Carver clones, McSweeney's tried to make literature fun again with lots of humor and a try-anything approach to design, editing and fiction.

  Gork the Teenage Dragon, Gabe Hudson
  "Not only are your reports about us dragons wildly inaccurate, they are downright insensitive and repugnant," Gork tells the reader.
  In addition to the quarterly, McSweeney's had an early humor website – still active and popular today – which is where Hudson started publishing letters. He soon met Eggers and was asked to operate as a plant in the audience during an Eggers reading. Hudson was tasked at interrupting with comments, like, "I'm sorry to bother you, but could you just slow down?" and "I’m thinking about getting a pet. Would you recommend I get a goldfish or a dog?" while everyone simmered in anger.

  What happened next was a whirlwind rise to publication. Hudson sold his car and moved to New York, where, after another Eggers reading, he was introduced to his editor. "I talked to her for like an hour. And then there was a two-book deal on the table within a week of that from Knopf and Vintage." The first book, Dear Mr. President, was a surreal satire of the Gulf War, where chimpanzees and mysterious extra body parts mingle with traumatized veterans and injured civilians. It won an Academy of American Arts and Letters prize for debut fiction.

  The second part of the two-book deal would take another 15 years.

  After the highs of publication, Hudson says he fell into the familiar pit of writer's block. "I was literally miserable for years," he says, although admits that outside of writing his life was pretty enjoyable. His mother and stepfather were living in Thailand, and he began traveling around Asia. "I went to Vietnam and lived there for a couple months. I went down to the islands of Thailand and lived in a beach bungalow on a beach for six weeks by myself trying to be a writer. I was like, 'This feels very writerly, let's let those words fly now.' But it didn't come so much." Then he took a tenure-track position at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, living there and teaching until 2012.

  While Gulf War satire and science-fiction dragon coming-of-age novel might seem like very different beasts, what connects Hudson's two books across the 15-year gap is his sharp humor. Comedy has always been important to Hudson, who says "in a parallel universe somewhere, I'm just doing stand-up. To me that is one of the great art forms." Hudson considers Kurt Vonnegut his guiding light, having read him constantly since seventh grade. "Never stopped. Except for a little bit of time when people tried to tell me that literature was something beyond that, and I waded in that for a while, and it was not satisfying. Then I went back to Vonnegut."

  Even when he was studying avant-garde literature at Brown, Hudson was prone to pranks. He describes introducing himself at the start of one of Coover's classes and explaining he was studying "neuro-linguistic science" that let him change the physical world with words. To demonstrate, he took the class outside and gave them water balloons. "You can throw a water balloon," he told them, "just say 'Gabe, are you thirsty?' And I say, 'Yes, mother, can I have a glass of water?' Then they'd throw and miss because, well, most people don't really know how to throw. When one hit, it bounced off him without breaking and Hudson said, 'Do you see how this is working?'"

  Gork fully commits to its voice and premise, telling the story of teenage warrior dragons without any human characters. Gork, with his puny horns and big heart (both literally and figuratively), has a hard time being the terror he has to be, and when "Crown Day" comes – a kind of dragon prom where instead of slow dancing you conquer planets – he goes on an epic quest to find his queen. Outcast cyborg dragons, underworld demons and Gork's mad scientist grandfather, Dr. Terrible, all get involved in a plot as bizarre as a Vonnegut novel.

  Sitting at the bar, Hudson is animated and excited that his writing led him – if in a circuitous path – to Gork. "You need to create a freedom for yourself, so that no one ever tries to box you in as 'the Gulf War novelist' or whatever the heck it is," he says. When writing Gork, he told himself to cast his literary net across the history of storytelling to employ everything he loved from all genres of literature. "You're going to use it all and have a kind of joy in the writing. And if they don't accept this novel, screw it, at least you had a good time writing it."

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabe_Hudson

  Gabe Hudson
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Gabe Hudson
  New GabeHudson CU Photo 0683 v2.jpg
  Gabe Hudson in Brooklyn 2015
  Born December 9, 1971 (age 46)
  Muncie, Indiana
  Occupation Novelist
  Residence Brooklyn, New York
  Education Brown University, The University of Texas at Austin
  Website
  www.gabehudson.com
  Gabe Hudson (born 1971) is an American writer who currently lives in Brooklyn. His novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon is forthcoming from Knopf on July 11, 2017.[1] Hudson’s first book of fiction, “Dear Mr. President” (Knopf, 2002), has been translated into seven languages, was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and received the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[2]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Life
  2 Work
  3 Publications
  4 References
  Life[edit]
  Hudson served as a rifleman in the Marine Corps Reserve, and holds a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University, where he received the top graduate creative writing award, The John Hawkes Prize in Fiction.[3]

  Work[edit]
  Hudson's story collection “Dear Mr. President” was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by GQ, as well as a Best Book of the Year by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Village Voice, and a New & Noteworthy Paperback by The New York Times.[4] It is considered to be "the first significant piece of Gulf-war fiction" according to Esquire.[5]

  Previously Hudson was Chair of the Creative Writing Program at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College.[6] Before Yonsei University, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University from 2004-2007.[7]

  Publications[edit]
  Hudson’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Village Voice, McSweeney’s, BlackBook, Granta, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The International Herald Tribune, and The New York Times Magazine.

  Hudson was a contributing writer for HBO’s book, “Six Feet Under: Better Living Through Death” (2004). He is an editor-at-large for McSweeney’s.[8]

  In 2007, he was selected as one of the “Twenty Best Young American Novelists” by Granta Magazine.

• Identity Theory - http://www.identitytheory.com/gabe-hudson/

  QUOTE:
  I grew up in a really artistic household. I played the violin rigorously as a kid—often I wasn’t allowed out of the house until I practiced for several hours. There was no television and my father and mother were both very literate. My father used to read to me at night—hours and hours. It would be Moby Dick, poetry by Wallace Stevens. There was no television and so pop culture, I had no idea what that was. As an act of rebellion I elected to go into the Marines. Really, to shock my parents and get a little adventure.

  Gabe Hudson
  By Robert Birnbaum | Published: September 26, 2002
  Gabe HudsonGabe Hudson grew up in Austin, Texas and attended the University of Texas. He was a rifleman in the United States Marine Reserves and has an MFA from Brown University. His writing has appeared in The Quarterly, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker and other periodicals. His book of stories and a novella, Dear Mr. President, has recently been published. Gabe Hudson makes New York City his home base and is working on a novel.

  Robert Birnbaum: You have been anointed, apparently. Dear Mr. President was included in last year’s Debut Fiction issue of The New Yorker and, of course, you have been published in Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s, which has its own clout.

  Gabe Hudson: Right.

  RB: I was puzzled by the accompanying photograph to Dear Mr. President in The New Yorker. That is, the author portrait complete with the gas mask, that is attached to the story.

  GH: I know the magazine usually does a photograph of the debut writers. In my case, it was this German photographer [Katharina Bosse]–it was all her idea. I didn’t really talk about it that much because the people I dealt with were the editors, Bill Buford and Deborah Treisman, who were both supportive and really wonderful.

  RB: I would have thought that readers of The New Yorker have sufficient respect for the editors, especially something labeled the Debut Fiction issue, to read unfamiliar work.

  GH: It was curious. It changed a lot for me. To the editors’ credit, many people have responded to that issue. When I go out into the world they remember the story and they remember me.

  RB: Is it the case that you submitted your story for that particular issue of the magazine? How does one get into the Debut Fiction issue?

  GH: It was something that my agent took care of totally. I just got e-mail from him—he was in Israel at the time—and he said there’s some serious interest. The next thing I knew they were in touch with me personally. I knew that issue was out there, but I perceived it as a real long shot.

  RB: How do you have an agent before you publish anything?

  I don’t think it’s as easy to pigeonhole me as it might be for somebody else who just has an MFA and it looks like they were groomed to be a professional writer./div>
  GH: Well, I had published in McSweeney’s. And I had published in journals extensively. University journals, which some people follow, for years and years.

  RB: Why wasn’t that included in your press materials?

  GH: That’s a good question. These are all questions that are related to things that I don’t have any control over.

  RB: Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t.

  GH: Truly, I don’t. They [publicity department] make the calls as to what magazines I’m to be associated with and what my credentials are.

  RB: Recently, I have talked to a number of writers, alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who have for various reasons chosen to exclude their academic backgrounds from their dust jacket biographies.

  GH: I see what you are saying. In my instance, I went to the Brown MFA program, which is a completely different thing from Iowa. They push a totally different aesthetic there.

  RB: Are Robert Coover and Carolyn Maso still at Brown University?

  GH: Coover has been a really brilliant support for me and was kind of a mentor and my thesis adviser. I think in the context of the book jacket Knopf thought it was intriguing, that I had this real world experience, that I had been in the Marine Reserves and but that I had this MFA background. I don’t think it’s as easy to pigeonhole me as it might be for somebody else who just has an MFA and it looks like they were groomed to be a professional writer.

  RB: Okay. You grew up in Austin, Texas. Did you go to the University of Texas as an undergraduate?

  GH: I did. I did.

  RB: And then you joined the Marine Reserves. Why did you do that?

  GH: I wish I could say that I was coerced, but I wasn’t.

  RB: In what year did you enter the military?

  GH: I’m fairly confident it was at the end of ’92. After the Gulf War. I did get some sort of ribbon that signified that I had enlisted in a time of conflict. So that they didn’t perceive the Gulf War as completely over. I grew up in a really artistic household. I played the violin rigorously as a kid—often I wasn’t allowed out of the house until I practiced for several hours. There was no television and my father and mother were both very literate. My father used to read to me at night—hours and hours. It would be Moby Dick, poetry by Wallace Stevens. I had no idea what he was talking about. None. He was a really compelling reader. He is a very enthusiastic person about literature, and he had the idea that if he read to me at an early age that the cadence of language would get in to me and somehow help me be a better human being.

  gabe hudsonRB: What did your father do?

  GH: He was like the uber father. He was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, for a while. Then he worked at the Chamber of Commerce. He was always doing things so that he could pursue—he plays the clarinet, he plays chess competitively, he does all these intellectual things—his occupation was just a means to provide for the family. Growing up like that, it was much different. There was no television and so pop culture, I had no idea what that was. As an act of rebellion I elected to go into the Marines. Really, to shock my parents and get a little adventure. I should also say that I really revered the book Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy—I probably read it 10 or 20 times. So, I wanted to know about that stuff. I wanted know about when he says things like, "When you look into the round and it speaks to your inner most heart." It’s somewhat preposterous to recite, but I felt that I wanted to know what that was all about. So I thought, “Infantry, Marines.” They wanted me to take a desk job. But I said, “No.” Subsequently, I ended up showering with ex-gang-bangers and so forth.

  RB: When did you start reading Cormac McCarthy?

  GH: It was a book that father initially gave to me. We started with Surtree. I’ve read everything that he’s written a couple of times. Of my own volition I probably started around 16. Blood Meridian stayed with me for a 4 or 5 year coma.

  RB: Ever considered making a pilgrimage to El Paso to visit McCarthy?

  GH: Through a friend of a friend there is somebody in the family that I am close to that is fairly close with him. They talk on the telephone and meet every once in a while and I’ve never met him personally and have always wanted to and I am waiting for the opportunity.

  RB: My impression is that he is pretty reclusive.

  GH: The funny thing is—I don’t know if he would ever read this—I don’t really think he is that reclusive. He’s friends with Sean Penn. There is word of him being in more high society circles than we might imagine. His book was made into a movie…

  RB: Well. We’ll see…

  GH: We could get him in here.

  RB: I’d be happy to go to him. He doesn’t have to come up here. Why should he? Why would anyone? Anyway, you were in the Reserves. What does that involve?

  GH: It involves undergoing the same training as any active duty soldier. I went to boot camp. I went to Marine Combat Training—which is standard infantry training for every Marine–and then I when to the School of Infantry. It’s regarded in the Marines as the toughest school you can go to. When I went there, everyone else went to their other jobs. They definitely made fun those of us who were, ostensibly, on their way to hell, for a couple of months.

  RB: Do you have Semper Fi tattooed anywhere on your body?

  GH: No, no no.

  RB: You were not a gung ho Marine?

  GH: There are things that you learn about yourself in that environment. It’s actually a really humorous environment. You are basically doing a dead pan the entire time.

  RB: If you are not in combat it may be humorous.

  GH: Even people who are in combat—if you look through historical books or in fiction—they have a strong sense of irony. All soldiers have. That’s the funny thing. People have asked, "Is anyone going to be offended by your book?" No, those guys have a much darker sense of humor than I do and they would tell jokes that would make me blush and want to leave the barracks. So yeah, it’s a really pure life style.

  RB: You are asked that question by people who have read your book?

  GH: Both. There are some real basic things. I have guys who leave their troop or their fire team or their Green Beret team. Ostensibly, in real life that would never happen. Those guys have a code. They also have a code that they never leave anyone behind, so they are doing things [in my stories] that they say would never happen.

  As an act of rebellion I elected to go into the Marines. Really, to shock my parents and get a little adventure.
  RB: As opposed to cross-dressing jet fighter pilots or veterans growing extra body parts?

  GH: That’s the thing. You can take the book how you want. There are stories in which I make more of a case for them. It was very important for me—people in uniform are not a demographic that I grew up with or knew much about. What was really interesting was that when I became involved with the Marine project, I did learn that they were human beings. I stayed up and talked to them at night and their parents have the same problems, as most parents and most people from my generation don’t know that because they have never been in the military. It seemed really important for me to grant these characters a little bit of grace. But also to have an anti-war sentiment in the book too. I wanted to make arguments for all sides. That seemed most compelling.

  RB: Reading this book probably took me more time than I ever spent considering the Gulf War. It came and went like that—I paid more attention to the invasion of Panama. Pop culturally it was a television war.

  GH: I think that even for the soldiers it was a bit of a farce. A 100-hour virtual war, 130 casualties of which 30 or 40 were friendly fire, as opposed to Vietnam. That [the Gulf War] was the first war where you actually had censorship. The journalists were only allowed into certain areas and when they were allowed the soldiers knew and they would do their hair, and look good. And so it became a stage set. Look, to some extent the book is an act of resistance against that. If you are going censor something then I’m going to get in there and write about it. If you want to tell me that this didn’t happen, that’s fine but maybe you want to show us what did happen. There was a lot of cover up.

  RB: The biggest being the Gulf War syndrome. But there is nothing new there because we have the precedents of Agent Orange and the Nuclear Veterans from the testing of the ’50s. Are the symptoms that you describe in the first story "The Cure As I Found It", real symptoms?

  GH: No. In each case those were tropes.

  RB: I got that.

  GH: Well, you never know. Somebody told me they were looking for a mouth on the back of their head.

  RB: The case of gaps appearing in the bones ["The Cure As I Found It"] seem possible.

  GH: I wanted that to be just a little bit more believable. When the character remarks, “I was going to be the human blob.” You can get the sense that I am playing. What I am asking the reader to swallow is pretty far fetched in the context of the book, so I opened the book with a seeming reality and then continue to stretch the truth throughout the book.

  RB: What literary reference points does this book have?

  GH: I knew that there was stuff out there and I had read it, but I didn’t want to go look it until after I had finished my book. I did go back and look at Catch 22 and Slaughter-House Five and Dr. Strangelove—there is also this lesser-known book called Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome by German writer Alexander Kluge.

  gabe hudsonRB: Say more about that book.

  GH: It’s fiction, science fiction. He actually has photos and it’s really dark and satiric. You have all these government documents and journal entries and these characters emerge. It’s beyond the End of the World. They have taken their war to outer space. That kind of tradition was important to me. I haven’t written about war prior to this book. It was something I did not want to do straight journalism. I had heard all these stories from other soldiers and I had waited long enough until my imagination could kick in, which is really important to me

  RB: Tell me about the stories you had written before Dear Mr. President.

  GH: They were standard stories. Stories about families and things that happen in the world. They weren’t revolutionary.

  RB: Why did you decide to go to Brown University?

  GH: It just came time for me to apply to MFA programs. I had published a little bit in some journals like The Quarterly with Gordon Lish. Brown seemed like the kind of school that would be empathetic with the kind of aesthetic I was into at the time. So I applied and was accepted. I was taken aback when it all happened. All my life I have gotten in trouble for being subversive and not acting in accordance with the status quo. Going to Brown, hooking up with Coover, getting to teach there was the first time where an institution or a group of people said. “You know, that thing that you tap into that gets you into trouble, that’s a good thing and we want you to explore that for a couple of years.”

  RB: Nice. It seemed to validate your existence.

  GH: Really. I had been pranking and pulling pranks and I wasn’t aware that one could construe a prank as a piece of art. I just didn’t make that connection. No one in Texas espouses that.

  RB: Performance art hasn’t made it to Texas? And the Merry Pranksters of the ’60s…

  GH: All that stuff is terrific. And improv. I’ve read and studied that stuff. It’s really important.

  RB: So after Brown did you intend to make a career out of writing?

  GH: Not at all. I knew nothing about agents and publishers. I really didn’t know anything. It’s not something that is encouraged at Brown. They want you to be pursuing art for art’s sake. I had been in touch with Dave Eggers through McSweeney’s. So I placed a piece there. I moved to New York with a manuscript and I lucked out. I got an agent within a couple weeks. Then an editor at Knopf, Jenny Minton, got hold of the manuscript. She called me at home three days later. A couple of days went by and they had an offer on the table for me.

  RB: Which manuscript?

  GH: For this book. It all happened super fast. I haven’t really looked back.

  RB: What’s a novella? Or what makes Notes from A Bunker Along Highway 8 [from Dear Mr. President] a novella?

  GH: I wish I could say there was something like subliminal messages. I don’t really know. It’s just a longish story. Maybe it’s marketing thing. There was a title page that didn’t make it into the book that was very ironic. It said, "Stories and a novella, heretofore known throughout the world as Dear Mr. President." Sort of making fun of that fact.

  RB: Why didn’t it make it in?

  GH: An editorial choice at the end.

  RB: Sounds like the kind of thing Dave Eggers would do with the colophon or the copyright page.

  GH: Right. It’s really terrific. I feel like Dave and the magazine [McSweeney’s] have changed the appetite of the American reading public. There’s a lot of fiction that’s out there now that people are willing to take a look at that they would not have been were it not for the magazine.

  RB: That’s pretty generous. I don’t quite see it that way. But I do think he has brought about some changes in publishing.

  GH: There are so many young people in New York that I encounter that are just enthusiastic about any sort of risk you want to take on the page.

  RB: That may be true. Eggers has become a gatekeeper that seems to be accessible to certain kinds of work, perhaps more so than others. I wonder about his self-publishing his new novel.

  Going to Brown, hooking up with Coover, getting to teach there was the first time where an institution or a group of people said, “You know, that thing that you tap into that gets you into trouble, that’s a good thing, and we want you to explore that for a couple of years.”
  GH: That’s an admirable thing.

  RB: Yes and interesting. He is selling it online, a first edition of 10,000 copies. He knows that the book will sell more—probably way more—than 10,000 copies. Why such a small initial printing?

  GH: Honestly, I don’t know what that is all about. The fact that he is selling through only independent bookstores—because those are the stores that sell McSweeney’s—is terrific. The other good thing about Dave—what’s rubbed off is he is really interested in making space for all different kinds of writers. So it’s not as if you need to be experimental—having come from Brown I do know that these vanguard types hate conventional stories and conventional storytellers also resent the vanguard. Dave makes a very good point in what he publishes and what he says in his interviews; there should be space for all. There’s really no reason for all this infighting.

  RB: You’ve been very lucky and I presume that you are working on your next book. Had you not been lucky what would you have done?

  GH: An MFA at Brown probably qualifies you to work behind the register at the grocery store. I think that I would always be writing. It’s just something that I’ve wanted to do since an early age. It’s the thing that makes sense to me. It’s a particular kind of dialogue that I am intrigued with.

  RB: You would have and will continue to write.

  GH: Oh, absolutely. I came to New York because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I wasn’t going to go back to Texas. I didn’t really think per se that something was going to happen with the book. I had every intention of trying to make something happen. Given the fact that I knew nothing about it and I did see these kids from Iowa and the other bigger and commercial programs, I had no idea how any of that happened. What I discovered was that people in the publishing world and the editors at magazines were a really incredible group of conscientious and generous people. It has just been really amazing. You can’t imagine how much some of these people care about the written word.

  RB: A little over a month ago I was talking with Richard Russo about among other things Jonathan Franzen’s book and he said in that context, “It’s strange isn’t it? I don’t know whether it was just the Oprah thing—it always amazes me that there are such failures of generosity among writers and among publishers. There’s a degree of venom, out there—I ran across it, in of all places, Barcelona.”

  GH: Really?

  RB: It’s nice that you have the point of view that you have, but I suspect that your life in publishing won’t be all days of wine and roses.

  GH: I am not suggesting that I am living days of wine and roses. I live in a tiny squalid little studio…

  RB: (laughs) All right, let’s hear some indignation.

  GH: …with a lot of roaches. I don’t have health insurance as we speak. There are a lot of sacrifices being made in the course of this. There are really terrific people and they really care. They are very dedicated to what they do and that is amazing. When you are writing you feel like ultimately you are the only one that cares about your work that much. But then you encounter these other people who do as well.

  RB: You are on a book tour that takes you around the country for what, a month?

  GH: Yes, and this is the first day of it.

  RB: Then you come back to New York and then what?

  GH: That’s a good question. I may go to England for a little bit.

  RB: For the book?

  GH: No, to just go away. To go somewhere else.

  What I discovered was that people in the publishing world and the editors at magazines were a really incredible group of conscientious and generous people.
  RB: You’ll find a squalid little flat in London?

  GH: Right. Well, I’m going to move underground in London. These are curious times in this country right now. I don’t know what’s going to be going on a month from now. I’m in the midst of working on this novel. I wrote a lot of this book while I was down in Mexico. I tend to move around a bit and New York is the home base. I’m really not sure where I’ll be.

  RB: Where in Mexico?

  GH: I was in Mexico City for a long time. Then to Oaxaca. Then there were some private beaches we ended up on, the names of which I can’t remember.

  RB: It’s a long way from Mexico City to Oaxaca.

  GH: Yeah, you get on these buses with movies and you just go.

  RB: Is there still revolutionary activity down there?

  GH: Oh sure. There is a lot of activism. I encountered some of it. Especially post 9/11. It was very bizarre to hear the responses there in regard to the attacks. It was really healthy for me to be outside the country and get a different perspective on things than those that were here and immediately just whipped their flags out of their pockets and started waving them around.

  RB: Do have a writing form that you prefer? Or fiction versus non-fiction?

  GH: Oh sure. I definitely prefer fiction. I can do non-fiction but the human element and creating characters and emotional turbulence is really what this is about for me. I’m not often satisfied with reality. Don’t misconstrue that remark but I like to tweak reality. And fiction is a good place to do that.

  RB: You might be able to trade up from your currently squalid digs by working for one of the great journals of our times who if they are not using better writers are at least employing more well-known ones.

  GH: Right. If somebody wants to send me overseas…a part of me is attracted to the old Hemingway thing, but I am also ambivalent about it. Part of this book was to take a subversive approach to that and the machismo man. So the myth of that, traveling somewhere and writing in a war zone like Afghanistan, is intriguing, but I’m not sure if it would ever take place.

  RB: Tell me again where you are with the novel you are working on?

  GH: I’m an indentured servant to Knopf.

  RB: You owe them a book.

  GH: I owe them a book. It’s kind of them, I guess, to want that from me. There is this big gulf of time before your book comes out. I found a really good time to distract myself from all this anxiety surrounding the publication date; it was to throw myself into the work. So yeah.

  RB: Do you look down the road, 5 years, 10 years?

  GH: Sure. I think about death and beyond death.

  RB: I didn’t mean that far down the road.

  GH: That’s all part of it. I just hope to be writing and hope to be in a place that I can do that. And be excited about it.

  RB: Do you have writer friends?

  GH: Sure. I have friends that are writers.

  RB: Writer parties and writer baseball games?

  GH: No, nothing like that. Most of my friends are visual artists or writers, they tend to be youngish, and it can be a real inspiration to know those people. I also spend a lot of downtime by myself. I’ll go days and days without seeing anyone in person. Which is fine. New York can be really anonymous. You spend a lot of time amongst people but you can be very alone.

  RB: How likely is your trip to England?

  GH: It’s pretty real. I tend to keep a lot of things on the horizon as options. I don’t anyone to predict what my next move is, so I keep a lot of options open and I just move with one.

  RB: When will your new fans see the novel?

  GH: I would guess September of 2004. It has to do with immigration and that’s all I’ll say.

  RB: How much has your life changed in the last year or so?

  GH: Well, it’s changed a lot. Probably for the better. I’m able to spend my days with a great deal of privacy, which is important to me. In the course of writing a book you end up with a much clearer sense of what the issues are that concern you. That’s really the best part.

  RB: Well good, Thank you.

  Copyright 2002 by Robert Birnbaum
  All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing

• Gabe Hudson Home Page - http://www.gabehudson.com/

  ABOUT GABE HUDSON

  GABE HUDSON is the author of Dear Mr. President, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hudson was named one of Granta's 20 Best of Young American Novelists and was a recipient of the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction from Brown University, and the Adele Steiner Burleson Award in Fiction from the University of Texas at Austin. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, McSweeney's, Black Book, and Granta. For many years, he was Editor-at-Large for McSweeney's. He lives in Brooklyn.

• Paris Review Online - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/07/11/dragons-and-deprivation-gabe-hudson-and-akhil-sharma-in-conversation/

  QUOTE:
  My goal was to write something that any type of reader would be able to commune with. I always think of myself as a kid—like, a fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old trying to make sense of the chaos of the world. Back then I was so grateful for Kurt Vonnegut, whose books sent a signal out to me, saying it’s okay to be kind of crazy, or, actually, this whole “life” thing you’ve been born into is kind of a lie, so let me tell you some even more outrageous lies to get at the truth. I was hoping, in writing this book, to send that signal out to anyone who might be in that position.
  Dragons and Deprivation: Gabe Hudson and Akhil Sharma in Conversation
  By Gabe Hudson and Akhil Sharma July 11, 2017 ARTS & CULTURE

  AKHIL SHARMA, LEFT, AND GABE HUDSON.

  On the face of it, Gabe Hudson’s debut novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon has little in common with A Life of Adventure and Delight, the new collection of stories by Akhil Sharma. Gork follows a dragon at WarWings Military Academy who must, as his graduation day approaches, ask a female dragon to be his queen, even though he’s the nerdiest dragon in the class. (If she declines, he’ll becomes a slave.) The eight stories in Adventure of Delight, meanwhile, are all set on Earth as we know it. They focus on Indian families at home and abroad, all of them navigating the vagaries of morality and love—a wife in an arranged marriage is shocked to find that she’s in love with her husband; a divorcé reads women’s magazines in an effort to become an ideal partner.

  You’d think two such writers would have little to say to each other. But Sharma and Hudson are longtime friends, and fate has dictated that their new books be published on the same day—today, in fact, July 11. To celebrate, the pair convened at a Park Slope apartment belonging to neither of them, where, over lasagna and cashews, they discussed the terrifying prospect of releasing their work into the world; enduring fallow periods of more than a decade between books; and the pleasures of imagining life on planet Blegwethia. —Ed.

  SHARMA

  It seems very special to have written something so artful and yet accessible. Gork, the Teenage Dragon has to be one of the more original novels that Knopf has published.

  HUDSON

  I think it’s safe to say that this is Knopf’s first space dragon. When I first started writing Gork, people would ask me, What are you working on? I would describe the book a bit, and it would sound absurd—for the longest time it was just me believing in this dragon, this space dragon. So now, to hear people reference Gork like he’s an actual entity has been the great pleasure. Gork has started to take on a life of his own, at this point. My goal was to write something that any type of reader would be able to commune with. I always think of myself as a kid—like, a fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old trying to make sense of the chaos of the world. Back then I was so grateful for Kurt Vonnegut, whose books sent a signal out to me, saying it’s okay to be kind of crazy, or, actually, this whole “life” thing you’ve been born into is kind of a lie, so let me tell you some even more outrageous lies to get at the truth. I was hoping, in writing this book, to send that signal out to anyone who might be in that position.

  SHARMA

  So much of the artistry of your book is on the level of the sentence—and on the level of these playful ideas, playful situations. Gork possesses the madcap invention and strange genius of Alice in Wonderland, which is by any standard high art, but the way the spirit is moving inside that book is in its humor, in its imagination. How many years has it been since you published your collection, Dear Mr. President?

  HUDSON

  Uh, fifteen years.

  SHARMA

  Oh, Lord. I had thirteen years between An Obedient Father and Family Life.

  HUDSON

  I remember, because I was actually very inspired by the way you brought Family Life into the world. We were friends before that and we used to have our strange lunches, our sad lunches, wondering why the world had left us behind, and would we ever rejoin the living?

  SHARMA

  When my book came out, I chose very deliberately to not read any reviews, to not engage with social media. That was just for my own personal psychology because I can become compulsive.

  Not reading these reviews, it diminished my fear. Like I can be very—it would be easy to be scared by, Oh what does this mean? You know, I spent all of this time writing it, what does it mean? Like, is it worthwhile?

  HUDSON

  I just tell myself that I have a lot to be grateful for, and ultimately I’m not going to look to somebody else to tell me what the value of the book is. I feel I’ve surveyed the landscape for a long time, been reading deeply, writing deeply, so I have a pretty strong sense of where the book fits in. I don’t think anybody is going to change my opinion radically about that. No one’s gonna knock me down. I’ve been knocking myself down for so long—I’m so good at it, nobody could be better at it than me. But this is before the storm. Maybe next time you see me, I’ll be in a padded room.

  SHARMA

  It’s strange how when I look at all my friends, how much effort is spent on managing one’s head, just sort of being able to live. To be an ordinary human being in the world, when you spend all of this time creating a product that nobody wants.

  HUDSON

  There’s a kind of built-in resistance against somebody releasing a book into the world. I think for me, having lived in Seoul, Korea, for five years was such a unique experience for my mind that coming back to the States—it makes it easier, having had that experience. And you, having grown up in India—is that a kind of armor you carry with you?

  SHARMA

  I left India such a long time ago that I feel like I’ve always been here. I think—correct me if I’m wrong, but your going to Korea was a sort of resetting of ambitions. Before, I think you had said you were going to write a more traditional novel, thinking about the soldier’s life.

  HUDSON

  Yeah, that’s what everybody—the industry kind of lets you know what it is they expect from you. That’s probably been the case to some extent for you, and for me nobody said it explicitly, but I was able to pick up on the signals. I was going to write a Gulf War novel. But I can’t say that going to Seoul was a reset. Again, I really didn’t know what I was doing at the time. But I will say that after having taken so long to write my debut novel, at a certain point I just said, you know, I don’t care what anybody wants from me, I’m just gonna write the thing that I wanna write for myself. Therefore, dragons in space. I think for a long time I bought into the myth that writing a novel is miserable. I think it is miserable, but it doesn’t have to be miserable in that way that I was experiencing. There’s, like, a more pleasurable misery—

  SHARMA

  The uncertainty of am I doing it well versus some other misery?

  HUDSON

  There’s a kind of irreverent pleasure in writing about something so far-out and taking it so seriously. Like, investing your whole emotional palate in all of your characters. It’s so absurd that it’s pleasurable. If I had written that Gulf War novel, I would not have felt good about myself. What about you? Have you felt—I mean, thus far I think we can safely say that a lot of your work has revolved around—

  SHARMA

  Indians and Indian Americans, yeah. When I organized this collection of short stories, I went back and read stories I’d written when I was nineteen. It was shocking to realize how similar the fears, concerns, issues were back then versus now. Somewhere deep inside all of my characters is this concern about loving and feeling unloved. And I find it strange that now, all of these decades later, it would still be there. The style has changed, the brushstrokes have gotten looser, but a lot of it has remained the same.

  HUDSON

  Can you tell me what you mean by “the brushstrokes have gotten looser”?

  SHARMA

  There isn’t the same plotting. Things occur over much longer periods of time, so there isn’t that compression of time that’s often attached to plot. I feel like I’ve gotten a greater ability to generate sympathy without plot. So I can say that, oh, you know, my family was like this—when we had guests over we would move the milk to the front of the fridge, the fridge’s shelves, so the fridge would look more full than it actually was. People can feel, can imagine this world and be present in it and feel sympathy for this character. And then to move from that detail to some other thing—that sympathy moves, too, because we can sort of see what a world of deprivation it is. It makes sense that the person would then act to overcome that deprivation. And oftentimes that deprivation is an absence of love. And the character would become almost crazy to meet that need.

  HUDSON

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about it like that. So you feel you have the confidence now just to say, Oh, here’s the milk that we’ve moved to the front of the fridge, and now let me go note this other form of—

  SHARMA

  Yeah, deprivation or strangeness or alienation. I feel like I can do this now. Before I would’ve always felt this need to turn the engine on.

  HUDSON

  What does that mean?

  SHARMA

  Like, get a plot going. And everything, all the details, are going to be generated in service to that plot. And now—if you’re willing to move across time, then the story becomes, How did these characters change over time?

  HUDSON

  Did you discover that while writing Family Life? Do you feel like that’s a technique that you arrived at in the process?

  SHARMA

  To some extent, yeah. I think it was just because Family Life takes place over all these years, and also that there isn’t a plot. It’s a series of events, but there isn’t causation. I was sort of learning how to do it there, whereas now I feel I can just do it.

  HUDSON

  Was it something you could articulate to yourself as you were learning, or was it just sort of intuition on the page?

  SHARMA

  Intuition—and also seeing that some things weren’t working, and saying, Okay, why? What’s another way of thinking about it? I thought about this series of nonevents and I saw I could create an arc from them—and that would substitute for plot.

  HUDSON

  Were there books or writers that you took cues from?

  SHARMA

  There were. I was looking to see how do you write without time, or without plot. And so I looked at all sorts of writers. I looked at all sorts of books. I looked at Housekeeping. I looked at Radetzky March. I looked at The Remembrance of Things Past, A House for Mr. Biswas. I did all those things. What’s interesting is to try to write without plot but not to give away the end. Which is what Radetzky March does, or Biswas does. It’s more difficult when you’re writing about characters who aren’t sympathetic—because to me, in Housekeeping, the characters are sympathetic, and my characters are not. If you’re with an annoying character, you are always trying to get away from this person.

  HUDSON

  Is that entirely true, though? I feel there’s a whole bunch of characters that are compelling to me in fiction and one reason they are is because I can relate to them or sort of connect with their emotional life, but then they do something that’s beyond what I would do, and I say, Don’t do that! Oh my God. But then I have to follow them through, because I still care. Do you think it’s fair to your characters to say that they are unsympathetic?

  SHARMA

  Well I mean, the idea is to take unsympathetic characters and cause the reader to sympathize with them. So they’re not unsympathetic, but they’re not easily sympathizable.

  HUDSON

  There’s something very rigorous about you as a writer, and as a friend—a kind of A House for Mr. Biswas. You will write the thing that might make the reader feel a little bit uncomfortable. But the truth of the statement is sort of irrefutable. It has a certain moral force to it, and it can have humor in it, too. It’s in line with the example you gave earlier of moving the milk to the front of the fridge. It’s a kind of vulnerability.

  SHARMA

  I think it’s just my own neuroses. My mind attacks itself. And it finds everything in the world to feel guilty about. I don’t know how to live in the world without being unimpeachable, but of course you can’t walk down the street without impeaching yourself in some way. And so that judgmentalness feeds into what these characters are doing. That’s just a sort of survivor skill that I live with. After my brother’s accident, after he became brain-damaged, I used to walk around my schoolyard crying, and I would talk to God. And I remember once God saying to me, Would you switch your place with Anup? My brother. And I said no. And I immediately thought, Oh, I’m bad because I’m not willing to do that. I’m not willing to sacrifice myself. I would think, I can’t be trusted, I need to be watched. The fact that I would choose myself over somebody else made me—it’s a survivor skill. It isn’t the fact that I survived and the other person did not but the fact that I would choose to survive over this other person.

  HUDSON

  But I don’t think that that would be unusual. Virtually all people would probably choose themselves. But there’s a moral dimension to your concern about yourself. Am I bad? Do I need to be watched? I do feel you flow into your characters. Those questions inform their existence a great deal.

  SHARMA

  Yeah, the need to be good. The need to be deserving of love. And that sort of self-watching is a way they become alienated from themselves.

  HUDSON

  Does that need to be good have its origin in any particular religious dogma or cultural perception, or is it just innate to them as humans?

  SHARMA

  I certainly think that my mother—and the prayers that we did—made me feel guilty all the time. We were praying every day, all the time, for my brother. In Hinduism, so much of the power of prayer is attached to sacrifice, like what you’re willing to sacrifice. So, my mother wouldn’t—she stopped drinking tea as a sort of sacrifice. When we prayed, do you just kneel down or would you lie face down? You know, all these different ways that you abase yourself before God, almost to shame him. I remember when we brought my brother home from the hospital, reading to him. I would read to him for like an hour, and then I’d want to go watch TV. I would feel that my wanting to watch TV was evidence that I was not sacrificing enough. All of that is tied to the question of, How do you affect God? Do you affect God not because he loves you but because you’re willing to sacrifice to him?

  HUDSON

  Right. That makes perfect sense.

  SHARMA

  Does religion feed into your book? It seems in some ways to have Christian ideas, Western, Judeo-Christian ideas.

  HUDSON

  Sure. I actually grew up in a home where there was not much religion at all. I’ve always felt kind of afloat. But I’ve always felt quite interested in religious notions and have done a bunch of reading and investigation. When I was living in Seoul, I was doing meditation, would go to some monasteries, that sort of thing. The questions that are important to a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old, they’re still important to me. What are we doing here? What is the purpose of life? Is there a … whatever? I like to engage with them through the text, to have fun with them.

  SHARMA

  Some parts of your book feel very Buddhist. This idea that nothing is serious.

  HUDSON

  That makes sense to me. I hope that Gork feels things very seriously.

  SHARMA

  He feels very seriously, but he exists in a certain context. There are crazy things that occur in this book. Like, fights using tongues.

  HUDSON

  Tongue-fu.

  SHARMA

  Tongue-fu.

  HUDSON

  That’s a dragon martial art on planet Blegwethia.

  SHARMA

  The whole concept is in some ways not serious. The consistency of its nonseriousness feels like a discipline. Do not allow all the normal constraints, the pulling and tugging, the way that fiction normally will pull you into mimetic reality. You resist it constantly. That feels very disciplined.

  HUDSON

  I think that’s why I didn’t write the Gulf War novel—I knew I had this other thing in me that I could do, this other thing which is hopefully reflected in Gork. I thought, Well, you really need to honor that special kind of crazy inside you. My editor, Edward Kastenmeier, would take me to these fancy lunches at Trattoria Dell’Arte. He would sit there and say, Okay, so I think Gork should be raised by machines, which would explain why he ends up becoming best friends with this cyborg dragon at his high school later. We applied a rigorous logic to this absurdity. And I’m so grateful. I’ll never forget those experiences. His ideas were brilliant and really hard to put into place. I remember thinking, How the hell am I gonna do that? But then I would go home and wrestle with it for a month and the solution would emerge.

  SHARMA

  Do you have a sense as to what you’re going to do next? Are you going to write more Gork things?

  HUDSON

  Well, his voice is very strong. I could write more. What I do know is that the next thing will, in tone, in texture, in the fictional world, be connected to Gork’s fictional world. So it’s like, okay, we’ve met the dragons on planet Blegwethia. What are some of the other planets in that universe? There’s such rich material to draw from. How could I leave that alone? I don’t think I could. It was really hard to construct all that and make it seem easy.

  SHARMA

  So once you’re done with this world-building, all of this imagining, why not continue mining it?

  HUDSON

  That’s my thinking. And it’s a comfortable place for me to go to. I think my proudest moment—you were asking early on about when the publisher started to embrace the book. They showed me some sort of catalog page and it described the book, and then it said, Location: fictional planet Blegwethia. And I was so proud of that. I thought, That’s just a thing I made up, but now it’s printed and now all these people gotta read that, and it will become more and more real, hopefully.

  Gabe Hudson is the author of Dear Mr. President. Hudson was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young American Novelists. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, McSweeney’s, Black Book, and Granta. He lives in Brooklyn.

  Akhil Sharma is the author of Family Life, a New York Times Best Book of the Year and the winner of the International DUBLIN Literary Award and the Folio Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. A native of Delhi, he lives in New York City and teaches English at Rutgers University–Newark.

• Powells.com - http://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-gabe-hudson-author-of-gork-the-teenage-dragon

  PowellsBooks.Blog
  Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.
  Q&AS
  Powell's Q&A: Gabe Hudson, Author of 'Gork, the Teenage Dragon'
  by Gabe Hudson, July 5, 2017 10:56 AM
  Gork, the Teenage Dragon by Gabe Hudson
  Photo credit: Linda Peters

  Describe your latest book.
  My new novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon has the plot of a John Hughes movie, but takes place at a high school for dragons. Think Sixteen Candles meets Harry Potter, if Harry had scales and a tail. The novel’s narrated by a 16-year-old dragon named Gork. He has two-inch horns, a giant heart, a predisposition to fainting, and a Will To Power ranking of Snacklicious, the lowest in his senior class.

  Gork is a senior at WarWings Military Academy for Draconum, and the novel takes place on Crown Day, when senior male dragons have to find a female dragon who will accept their crown and agree to mate with them. If the dragonette says yes, then the couple will launch into space, so that they can conquer a foreign planet together and start a colony. In this world, the female dragons are extremely fierce and tough. And Gork has his sights on Runcita, the most beautiful and powerful dragonette in his class.

  Gork’s allies are his best friend Fribby, a silver robot dragon whose Will To Power rank is MegaBeast, and his sentient spaceship, Athenos II. Also possibly his grandpa, the mad scientist dragon Dr. Terrible. But definitely not Runcita’s father, Dean Floop, who lost an eye recently in an altercation with Dr. Terrible.

  Did I mention Sixteen Candles?

  Think of it as the most epic adventure ever to get a prom date, but with dragons.

  What was your favorite book as a child?
  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I read and studied this book so much it changed the shape of my brain (I used to have a very round-shaped head, but then it became tall and pointy like a skyscraper). My parents divorced when I was five and I’m an only child, so I treated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland like the sibling I never had. We went everywhere together, we shared a lot of inside jokes, and we learned to see the insanity of the real world around us for what it was — a book not nearly as well-written as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Or maybe we grew new eyes together, with extrasensory perception. What that book and I did was a complete and total mind-meld. As a kid, sometimes we’d see the ghost of who I used to be wandering around in the backyard, the non-Alice-enhanced version of myself. He was a pitiful creature, and nobody I cared to know.

  That book taught me something else invaluable, or maybe we learned it together. THE ADULTS IN OUR LIVES WERE MOSTLY GIGANTIC LIARS AND GLARING HYPOCRITES, THEIR DAYS EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO AVOID EVER HAVING TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT FACT.

  On the flip side, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland showed me that the best and most audacious lies were the truth, and as you turned the pages you could feel the truth vibrating through your entire body like a tuning fork. Of course, even with my fantastic new sibling Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I was still pretty miserable. It took many more years for me to fully understand that reading was the only way to access reality.

  Even today my head is still very tall, and there’s no thought in there that doesn’t have at least a little Wonderland shape to it.

  When did you know you were a writer?
  As a kid I told everyone that I loved to write and that when I grew up I’d be a professional writer. Though the truth is, back then I hadn’t really written anything. When I listened to that Beatles song "Paperback Writer" I could sort of feel myself becoming a writer, but I never told anyone about that because I wasn’t sure they’d understand. What with them not being a writer and all. Somehow with all that telling I think I sort of just talked myself into being a writer. By the time I realized what I’d done, it was too late to turn back.

  What does your writing workspace look like?
  It’s a giant bed with white sheets and six pillows and a body pillow to prop my legs up on and a bed wedge to lean back against. It’s as close as you can come to floating in a cloud.

  What do you care about more than most people around you?
  I’m sort of obsessed with the idea that there are other ways of experiencing reality that are as or more legitimate than ours. Why do animals stare at us like that? Can they see that we’re actually tiny hairless creatures trapped inside a snow globe?

  Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
  I’ll tell you something I maybe should be embarrassed to admit but I’m not — I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.

  Introduce some authors you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
  I wholeheartedly recommend:

  1. Saeed Jones’s poetry collection Prelude to Bruise
  2. Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia!
  3. Kelly Link’s story collection Get in Trouble
  4. Alex Gilvarry’s forthcoming novel Eastman Was Here

  Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
  Not known or locatable. I’ve moved around a lot, and mostly just give stuff away. So hopefully other people have beloved collections, with a trace of my ghost floating around them.

  What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
  Probably serving as reservist in the Marine Corps infantry during college. Strangest thing about that was it grew my capacity for empathy by a bazillion. I learned to have greater love and compassion for a whole bunch of different kinds of people who came from all walks of life that were radically different from my own. In no way am I recommending that anyone enlist. This was just part of my own weird path. And I’m grateful for it.

  Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
  Honestly I feel like I’ve been on a literary pilgrimage my entire life, trying to find myself. So far no sightings.

  What scares you the most as a writer?
  That the psychic toll will turn out to have been too great and not worth it. It’s a form of flirting with insanity. I once started to calculate how many hours I’d already spent alone in a room in my life, but then some survival switch went off in my head and I lost all sense of who or what I was. Still not sure I’m all the way back yet.

  If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
  A True Fool: Never Even Right About How Incredibly Wrong He Was (About Everything)

  Share a sentence of your own that you're particularly proud of.
  "And how our love is a miracle."

  Proud of it because of all the comedy and emotional registers you have to hit in the course of a novel in order to think you might’ve earned the right to state something that earnest, and mean it with all your heart.

  Describe a recurring or particularly memorable dream or nightmare.
  I’ve been having horrible nightmares since I was a little kid. I wet my bed until much later than normal. As a kid, I used to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, one of my parents rushing in the door. Bet you don’t want to ask me any more nightmare questions, right? I’m just glad I’m seeing my shrink tomorrow.

  What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
  People's insistence that such a thing exists. Grammar’s an outdated superstition. Leave it for the crypto-zoologists.

  Do you have any phobias?
  I’m always on the lookout for new ones, but I’ve had a nice batch in rotation for as long as I can remember. Crazy fear of heights, fear that evolution made a terrible mistake by pushing us forward, fear that I died a while back and just haven’t realized it yet, fear that I might die while answering these questions…

  Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
  Does living count as a guilty pleasure?

  What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
  “You are such an idiot, you messed everything up so bad.” (From the voice in my head.)

  Did you write your new novel to, in some way, help out some younger version of yourself that was helplessly floundering around, lost in the darkness?
  Yeah right, like you ever outgrow any of those problems.

  Top Five Books That Can Be Enjoyed Equally by the Living and the Dead (You Don’t Have to Stop Reading Just Because You Die, Think of Death Like a Bookmark):
  I love books that are unbiased, that light up young and old hearts in equal measure. Or no hearts even, just the empty space in your rib cage where a robin built a nest. When a book has no target audience, provides equal-opportunity enchantment. I’m talking about books whose power lies in the fact that they can’t be contained or explained. Their imaginative swagger is terrifyingly humane, maybe even hilarious. I’m talking about shapeshifter books, leaping easily and with joy over all those walls and borders designed to keep stories in their place, to break their spirit. Books that can be enjoyed by the dead and the living, written with a logic that translates above or below ground. At the local cemetery library, a skeleton hand reaches for such a book. Something for everyone. These books have age-defying appeal.

  1. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
  2. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
  3. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea
  4. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
  5. Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  Gabe Hudson is the author of Dear Mr. President, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hudson was named one of Granta's 20 Best of Young American Novelists and was a recipient of the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction from Brown University, and the Adele Steiner Burleson Award in Fiction from the University of Texas at Austin. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, McSweeney’s, Black Book, and Granta. For many years, he was Editor-at-Large for McSweeney’s. He lives in Brooklyn. Gork, the Teenage Dragon is his most recent book.

QUOTE:
The whole novel reads
like a mad scramble to find the right date for prom, complete with nerds and jocks--but mainly dragons.
Recommend this one to fans of offbeat science fiction and fantasy
Gork, the Teenage Dragon
Biz Hyzy
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p71.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Gork, the Teenage Dragon. By Gabe Hudson. July 2017.400p. Knopf, $24.95 (9780375413964).
Despite his low mating magnetism score, Gork (first name) the (middle name) Terrible (last name) is on a
quest to ask the "luscious" Runcita to be his queen for EggHarvest, a dragon breeding tradition. If he doesn't
find a mate by sunset, he'll waste the rest of his days as a slave. Although Gork speaks in the amusing
jargon of a sardonic, misguided teenager, he's a big softie. He cries after mustering the courage to kill
demons, and despite knowing his polite behavior disappoints his famous scientist grandfather, he can't help
but faint, apologize, and express gratitude. Gork starts out ashamed of his peaceful instincts, but his female,
part-robot best friend does not. Dragon aggression parallels real-life, toxic masculinity, encouraging readers
to root for Gork as he defies those that try to make his horns larger and heart smaller. The whole novel reads
like a mad scramble to find the right date for prom, complete with nerds and jocks--but mainly dragons.
Recommend this one to fans of offbeat science fiction and fantasy, such as the Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy series.--Biz Hyzy
YA: Gork might have a "scaly green ass, " but teens will laugh and relate to his desperate search for a date.
BH.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hyzy, Biz. "Gork, the Teenage Dragon." Booklist, June 2017, p. 71. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582772/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a1002ae9.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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QUOTE:
If it all sounds a bit crazy, it is, in a weird and kind of wonderful way that combines
immature humor with a heartfelt coming-of-age story. The hyperkinetic teen-dragon comedy-romance you
never knew you wanted.
Hudson, Gabe: GORK, THE TEENAGE
DRAGON
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hudson, Gabe GORK, THE TEENAGE DRAGON Knopf (Adult Fiction) $24.95 7, 11 ISBN: 978-0-375-
41396-4
A teenage boy dragon battles bullies, a mad scientist, and his own self-doubt in his quest to win over a girl
dragon.It's hard not to love a story about a dragon with a spaceship that cribs its plot from a John Hughes
movie. Hudson (Dear Mr. President, 2002) follows up his devastating short story debut with a wacky teen
comedy with shades of Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt. Our narrator is Gork, a clumsy but very determined
student at WarWings Military Academy on the planet Blegwethia. Our boy isn't doing so hot with his
diminished horns, a power rating of "Snacklicious," and the nickname "Weak Sauce." As happens in teen
comedies, it's "Crown Day," in which dragons must ask a girl to be their queen or be forever banished as a
slave. Gork's intended paramour is the fierce Runcita Floop. "Me and my Queen Runcita will be laying
plans for invading a planet together," Gork says. "Soon I'll be out in space on my Fertility Mission, and me
and Runcita will be 'bumping scales,' so she can lay my eggs." Unfortunately, Dean Floop has no intention
of letting Gork anywhere near his daughter. Technically, Gork has some help from his grandfather Dr.
Terrible, which includes a brain implant that makes him more ferocious when he recites poems, but grandpa
is also malicious and kind of insane. Gork has other allies, though, in his tomboy friend Fribby (a cyborg
dragon who takes no guff from Gork) and his spaceship Athenos II, a sentient being that carries secrets from
Gork's childhood. If it all sounds a bit crazy, it is, in a weird and kind of wonderful way that combines
immature humor with a heartfelt coming-of-age story. The hyperkinetic teen-dragon comedy-romance you
never knew you wanted.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Hudson, Gabe: GORK, THE TEENAGE DRAGON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002917/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a218f6d.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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QUOTE:
Hudson's cleverly plotted and executed tale allows for a number of insights into the beastly adolescent
behavior that can bedevil humans of all ages.
Gork, the Teenage Dragon
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Gork, the Teenage Dragon
Gabe Hudson. Knopf, $24.95 (400p) ISBN 9780-375-41396-4
The sorrows of adolescent dragon Gork the Terrible start when he's hatched on Earth, the honeymoon
destination of his parents, who were killed when their spaceship crashed there. He's raised by his sentient
spaceship until he's three and then rescued by his fiendish grandfather, Dr. Terrible, and taken to the
dragons' home planet, Blegwethia. Gork, cursed with laughably tiny horns, a tendency to faint in moments
of crisis, and a compassionate heart--the last of which is considered the greatest failing for a dragon--is a
teenage enrollee at the War Wings Academy when he faces the ultimate challenge: win the luscious chick
Runcita Floop as his queen, or become a slave for life. Gork's amusing growing-up story unfolds in
vignettes of encounters with various kooky fellow dragons and episodes of Dr. Terribles battles with
Runcita's father, Dean Floop. Throughout, Hudson makes generally witty and occasionally brilliant
reflections on humans' often reptilian behavior. Each time Gork's soft heart gets him in trouble with his
peers and superiors, it marks a stage in his scaly maturation, until finally he finds his true love and accepts
his destiny not as a fire-belching killer but as a sensitive poet. Though the fun starts to wear thin over time,
Hudson's cleverly plotted and executed tale allows for a number of insights into the beastly adolescent
behavior that can bedevil humans of all ages. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Gork, the Teenage Dragon." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 50. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820791/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63bd4177.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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QUOTE:
harrowing, courageous, darkly humorous collection
Hudson's hip, ironic voice helps create stories that resonate with disturbing poignancy.
Dear Mr. President
Patrick Sullivan
Library Journal.
127.15 (Sept. 15, 2002): p95.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Knopf. 2002. c.192p. ISBN 0-375-41395-2. pap. $19. F
Hudson was featured in a recent issue of The New Yorker devoted to promising young fiction writers, and
this honor is richly deserved; his harrowing, courageous, darkly humorous collection of stories about the
Gulf War may very well prove to be the equal of Tim O'Brien's celebrated Vietnam collection, The Things
They Carried. What is perhaps most noteworthy about Hudson's work is its fearlessness. He clearly wants
us to see that the Gulf War was not the painless, "surgical" event that it may have appeared to on TV.
Hudson's soldiers react to their traumatic combat experiences in a variety of ways, but the most debilitating
damage they sustain is psychological. As they try unsuccessfully to return to civilian life, they find that the
margins between nightmare and reality, the real and the surreal, have become painfully blurred. For
instance, the protagonist in "The Cure as I Found It" copes with his guilt by practicing visualization to get
into Heaven. Hudson's hip, ironic voice helps create stories that resonate with disturbing poignancy. An
impressive collection; enthusiastically recommended for all libraries.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester
Community Coll., CT
Sullivan, Patrick
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sullivan, Patrick. "Dear Mr. President." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2002, p. 95. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A92524456/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2f436b85.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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QUOTE:
Hudson, a former
marine reserves rifleman, displays a brilliantly macabre sense of humor, a fine ear for military and
bureaucratic cliches and abundant compassion for his quirky, bruised characters. This is a fine debu
Dear Mr. President. (Fiction)
Publishers Weekly.
249.26 (July 1, 2002): p52+.
COPYRIGHT 2002 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
GABE HUDSON. Knopf $19 (192p) ISBN 0-375-41395-2
* The Gulf War may not be the sort of glamorous conflict that lends itself to shoot-'em-up war fiction, but
the Middle East face-off does seem ideal fodder for the eight darkly comic, military gothic short stories in
Hudson's first collection. "The Cure as I Found It" is a twisted yarn about a vet with Gulf War syndrome
who finds peace only after confronting a Brooklyn neighborhood thug who killed his cat. "Cross Dresser"
takes the form of a former POW's letter to his shrink after he switches bodies with his 13-year-old daughter
to elude his Iraqi tormentors. The title story is a humorous ode to the power of biological warfare as a
soldier begins to grow a third ear on his torso after returning home. In "Woman in Uniform," a soldier
muses about a female soldier in his squad as well as his nymphomaniac ex-girlfriend while his unit becomes
enmeshed in a My Lai-like incident. The best and most complex story is the wonderfully weird "Notes
From a Bunker Along Highway 118," which deals with a soldier who saves a fallen comrade and suddenly
deserts his unit, only to become trapped in a bunker with a discarded group of chimps. Hudson, a former
marine reserves rifleman, displays a brilliantly macabre sense of humor, a fine ear for military and
bureaucratic cliches and abundant compassion for his quirky, bruised characters. This is a fine debut that
may remind readers of George Saunders. (Aug. 30)
Forecast: Hudson's high-profile head start -- he has racked up appearances in the New Yorker's 2001 Debut
Fiction issue and Dave Eggers's literary/humor rag McSweeney's--has already gotten this collection on
readers' radar screens.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dear Mr. President. (Fiction)." Publishers Weekly, 1 July 2002, p. 52+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A89233755/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3fd2ad63.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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QUOTE:
Hudson's tales deliver
their sad humanity in the mode of absurdity, and deep beneath the wordplay and high-jinks are plenty of
smart satire and not a few tears.
An important contribution to war literature, and certainly a talent to watch
Dear Mr. President: Stories and a Novella.
(Fiction)
Kirkus Reviews.
70.12 (June 15, 2002): p829.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hudson, Gabe
Knopf (192 pp.)
$19.00
Aug. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41395-2
Eight debut stories and a novella about America's relationship with conflict and violence in the context of
the Gulf War.
If combat is changing, then so must war stories. The novella here, "Notes From a Bunker Along Highway
8," is a rambling account of a soldier stationed along the Euphrates River contending with the chimpanzees
in his care; with a one-armed buddy to whom he is teaching yoga; and with letters from his angry GreenBeret-hero-just-come-out-of-the-closet
father. In the letters the soldier is told, "I can't wait to see the great
stories your generation write about their war. Oh, boy. That's going to be fascinating. What do you know of
honor, of sacrifice, of death anyway?" A good deal, it turns out, though expect it in the form of wacky. In
"The Cure as I Have Found It," the bloodthirsty origins of war can't be escaped even by a vet: his life and
trauma are retold in the tone of impassioned hypercombat. "Cross Dresser" is a Stealth pilot ex-POW's
melancholy and metaphysical explanation of why, now, his wife has films of him in girls' dresses. The title
story is a letter to Bush from a loyal young corporal who comes home from the war with an extra ear, which
causes his wife to grow an extra tooth, both suggesting the effect of war on family. "The American Green
Machine" is a satire of a futuristic recruitment scheme that brainwashes jarheads. Hudson's tales deliver
their sad humanity in the mode of absurdity, and deep beneath the wordplay and high-jinks are plenty of
smart satire and not a few tears. At times, the imagery can seem adolescent, but even this rings true for a
nation that is itself, Hudson tells us, adolescent. Still, one wishes for fewer easy jokes and more lines like
"Dead sheep littered the landscape like fallen clouds."
An important contribution to war literature, and certainly a talent to watch. Along with Jonathan Safran
Foer and others, Hudson was featured in the New Yorker's Debut Writers of 2001 issue.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dear Mr. President: Stories and a Novella. (Fiction)." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2002, p. 829. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A87857299/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3759ec7. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A87857299
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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HUDSON, Gabe. Gork, the Teenage Dragon
Sarah Hill
School Library Journal.
64.1 (Jan. 2018): p92+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
HUDSON, Gabe. Gork, the Teenage Dragon. 400p. Knopf. Jul. 2017. Tr $24.95. ISBN 9780375413964.
Gork the Terrible isn't having a good day on planet Blegwethia--his grandfather half-blinded his
schoolmaster last night and is in hiding, his spaceship is turning against him, and he can't find the love of
his life to ask her to be his queen for EggHarvest. Despite reciting epic poetry and trying to grow his horns
quickly to make himself more attractive, Gork, nicknamed Weak Sauce, is a struggling dragon who doesn't
live up to his Terrible family name. His heart is too big, and he has feelings, which result in taunts from
classmates. His Ferris Bueller-like one-day adventure will decide his future--finding his queen and
conquering a planet or becoming enslaved to other dragons. Fantasy readers will enjoy this playful romp
that pays homage to popular literature and movies. Gork is a dragon version of Andrew Smith's Austin
Szerba in Grasshopper Jungle--consumed by hormones, an obsession that may become repetitive to some
readers. VERDICT Give to fantasy fans who appreciate dark comedies, dorky dragons, or feel-good first
romances.--Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hill, Sarah. "HUDSON, Gabe. Gork, the Teenage Dragon." School Library Journal, Jan. 2018, p. 92+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521876256/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=600b46f3. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
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QUOTE:
first collection is a remarkable weapon; he fights war--however it may be defined--with metaphor and
hallucination. Hudson deliberately destroys the logic of hierarchy.

Gabe Hudson. Dear Mr. President
Irving Malin
The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
23.1 (Spring 2003): p161+.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Review of Contemporary Fiction
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/review
Full Text:
Knopf, 2002. 155 pp. $19.00.
Although Hudson has been influenced by the war novels of Vonnegut and Heller, he is not a mere imitator.
His first collection is a remarkable weapon; he fights war--however it may be defined--with metaphor and
hallucination. He moves swiftly; he attacks patriotic cliches. Hudson creates a world in which bodies turn
into parts, minds overwhelm official speech. The narrator of "Cross Dresser," who is in the mental ward of a
VA hospital, makes a fashion statement: instead of an official uniform, he says, "I tape my penis down
between my legs and put on a pair of flowered panties. I put on one of my mom's dresses and too much
lipstick and eyeliner and admire myself in the big mirror in the living room." (Hudson laughs at masculinity
in many stories.) In "Dear Mr. President" the narrator writes to President Bush to explain his transformation.
He sees that he is losing parts of his body (and mind) and gaining new ones: "I figure if you can get an ear
or a mouth, then it's possible to get a set of wings. And, of course, if I had wings I could fly out to my
mother-in-law's house in Seattle, and I know that if Mrs. Laverne looked up in the sky and saw me flying
with my new wings, she would get over the ear and mouth and nose thing. Who could turn down a man
with wings?" Hudson deliberately destroys the logic of hierarchy. He knows that war is not so much a
matter of transcripts, briefs, registered documents--a paper world--as a wired (weird) machine inhabited by
mentally challenged visions and disintegrating bones.
Malin, Irving
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Malin, Irving. "Gabe Hudson. Dear Mr. President." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1,
2003, p. 161+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A99492048/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3f2a9454. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A99492048

QUOTE:
Dear Mr. President is a war book like no other.
The stories are a surreal mix of the tragic, the violent and the humorous, like war itself. It's as if Salvador Dali had rewritten All Quiet on the Western Front .
Hudson's battle scenes are so realistic that they evoke images of oil-well fires and sand.

Dear Mr. President': War with an edge By: Stephen J. Lyons, USA Today, OCT 03, 2002
Database:
Academic Search Complete
'Dear Mr. President': War with an edge
Listen

Section: Life, Pg. 06d

Dear Mr. President: Stories and a Novella

~~~~~~~~

By Gabe Hudson

Knopf, 155 pp., $19

---

Dear Mr. President is a war book like no other. Readers will not find the usual stories about faceless soldiers plunging bravely toward enemy fire. These seven stories and a novella, about the 1991 Gulf War, summon characters who shine a human light on the 100-hour, mostly virtual conflict.

Gabe Hudson is too careful a writer to tell us directly, but one can easily discern the anti-war themes. This is particularly relevant as the United States considers war with Iraq. The stories are a surreal mix of the tragic, the violent and the humorous, like war itself. It's as if Salvador Dali had rewritten All Quiet on the Western Front .

Hudson went through Marine combat training and the School of Infantry, but he never saw action in the Middle East. He did, however, know many Marines who returned from Desert Storm suffering from Gulf War syndrome and other traumas -- their personal lives unraveling around them.

Hudson's stories suggest the nightmares often begin when the soldiers return home.

In Dear Mr. President , their fictionalized sadness often threatens to overwhelm the book, but then Hudson adds an outlandish twist. The results are uneven, alternating between hilarious and jarring.

In the title story, Lance Cpl. James Laverne writes a letter to President George Bush Sr. about liberating Kuwait. Hudson's battle scenes are so realistic that they evoke images of oil-well fires and sand.

But then the story turns bizarre. Laverne discloses that his marriage fell apart because he came back from the war with a human ear attached to his second rib. Then his wife finds a new mouth on the back of her head and their son's nose disappears. Still, Laverne remains a patriot, refusing to indulge in "Gulf Syndrome whining."

Kafka-esque elements surface in many of the stories. In "The American Green Machine," a high school graduate awakes to discover that a Marine Corps recruiter has implanted a brainwashing device in his head.

In the strongest piece, the novella "Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8," a yoga-practicing Green Beret named G.D. deserts his platoon to live in a bunker beneath the desert, coming out at night to help the wounded on both sides. He shares the hole with six chimpanzees. What pushed G.D. over the edge was a hallucination of George Washington during a fierce battle. "He was shirtless, sitting in a wooden hot tub with his arms draped around two blond Bud Girls in bikinis. 'Come reap some of the rewards of all your toil on the battlefield, son.' "

Somehow G.D. receives regular letters from his gay father, a decorated Green Beret who is opposed to the Gulf War. "I can't wait to see the great stories your generation writes about their wars. And what are you fighting for? Oil. How dignified, how noble, how principled. What's the battle cry over there, 'Fill 'er up'? "

(c) USA TODAY, 2002

Source: USA Today, OCT 03, 2002
Item: J0E263278195902

Hyzy, Biz. "Gork, the Teenage Dragon." Booklist, June 2017, p. 71. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582772/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Hudson, Gabe: GORK, THE TEENAGE DRAGON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002917/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Gork, the Teenage Dragon." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820791/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Sullivan, Patrick. "Dear Mr. President." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2002, p. 95. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A92524456/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Dear Mr. President. (Fiction)." Publishers Weekly, 1 July 2002, p. 52+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A89233755/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Dear Mr. President: Stories and a Novella. (Fiction)." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2002, p. 829. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A87857299/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Hill, Sarah. "HUDSON, Gabe. Gork, the Teenage Dragon." School Library Journal, Jan. 2018, p. 92+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521876256/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Malin, Irving. "Gabe Hudson. Dear Mr. President." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1, 2003, p. 161+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A99492048/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. 'Dear Mr. President': War with an edge News By: Stephen J. Lyons. USA Today. 10/03/2002.

• New York Times Book Review Online
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/books/review/jomny-sun-gabe-hudson-gork-the-teenage-dragon.html
  Word count: 1131

  Misfit Creatures, Otherwise Known as Kids Today
  By ETHAN GILSDORFAUG. 24, 2017

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  From “Everyone’s a Aliebn...”
  GORK, THE TEENAGE DRAGON
  By Gabe Hudson
  380 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

  EVERYONE’S A ALIEBN WHEN UR A ALIEBN TOO
  A Book
  By Jomny Sun
  Illustrated. 304 pp. Harper Perennial. $14.99.

  Pity poor, nerdy Gork. He’s prone to fainting and sweating. He crashes into walls. He’s an orphan, a virgin and a would-be poet. He’s got every classic loser trait short of bedwetting. “I feel so ashamed, I just want to vacate my life,” Gork laments. Every time we read his name, we’re meant to hear “dork.”

  Gork’s also got horns and they’re too short. The horny kid is, in fact, a dragon from the planet Blegwethia, the setting for Gabe Hudson’s genre-bending new coming-of-age tale, “Gork, the Teenage Dragon.” Gork is about to graduate from WarWings Academy, an institution whose cutthroat corridors and cliques might recall your high school, if it were crawling with giant reptiles. In Hudson’s cartoonish universe of anthropomorphic, adolescent dragons, jocks and “normals” inhabit the upper social strata. Then come nerds, mutants and “Dragobots” like Gork’s cybernetic gal-pal, Fribby. The whole enterprise drifts more than a few puffs away from Peter, Paul and Mary’s “land called Honah Lee,” closer to Hogwarts and Holden Caulfield’s Pencey Prep.

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  Gork and his fellow cadets may snort “firebolts” and belch “firestreams,” but they also pilot sentient spacecraft, wear capes and wield “powerstaffs”: souped-up scepter/smartphones packed with gadgets like teleporters and lasers that would make Wile E. Coyote drool. With me so far? The story picks up with Crown Day and EggHarvest, the annual ritual where male cadets pair up with female queens, and then embark, via spaceship, to conquer and colonize other planets, which they populate with baby dragons that result when the couple “rub scales.” But with his “big stupid over-large heart” and rock-bottom “mating magnetism score,” Gork’s got no macho dragon mojo. Find no mate, and he’ll become a slave.

  Continue reading the main story
  Hudson, formerly an editor for McSweeney’s, made a splash with his darkly comic debut collection of short fiction, “Dear Mr. President” (2002), set during the gulf war. “Gork, the Teenage Dragon” is an uneven follow-up whose execution doesn’t live up to its premise.

  For one, I wondered about Hudson’s intended audience. The storytelling feels too libidinous and crude (and occasionally gruesome) for middle grade or young adult readers. Gork’s idea of clever is to refer repeatedly to his “scaly green ass,” when he’s not ogling every “juicy dragonette,” especially the “luscious tail” of Runcita, the she-dragon he fancies. Yet the humor and action seem too slapstick to appeal to most adult readers. And Gork’s voice — a crucial element, since he’s a first-person, present-tense narrator — often lands like a dead weight on the page. “Anyway, now back to this battle in the spaceship. Well like I was saying, Athenos II’s muscular tentacle is bashing Fribby’s shiny head … Bam bam bam bam bam.” Gork’s speech is oddly peppered with anachronistic exclamations — “yes sir,” “shoot” and “doodly-squat,” “Thank goodness. My wings are exhausted!” Is this a moody, hormonal teenager or a caricature of a Depression-era codger?

  Hudson’s bigger obstacle is that most of the novel’s events unfold on that single EggHarvest day. The pace slows to a crawl. One can sense Hudson running out of ways to thwart Gork from getting the girl. Hence, many repetitive scenes describe encounters with bullies.

  As if from a cosmic grab-bag, Hudson pulls out sword-and-sorcery and sci-fi standards, including wormholes, a prophecy and a mad scientist (Dr. Terrible, Gork’s grandfather) who’s created a mind-swapping machine. Paean, pastiche or parody? If Hudson means to lampoon genre conventions, in the spirit of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, his blade is too dull. Still, a more worldwise Gork occasionally shines through. In Chapter 1, he takes a bite at “that bastard” J.R. R. Tolkien, whose “The Hobbit,” he complains, “paints us dragons out to be a bunch of ignorant and repulsive savages.” That’s more like it. I wish “Gork, the Teenage Dragon” had more teeth.

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  An outcast of another species can be found in Jomny Sun’s “Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too.” Jomny is the alter ego of Jonathan Sun, an architect, artist and M.I.T. doctoral student whose Twitter witticisms have racked up nearly half a million followers. In this book-length comic collection of Sun’s social media routine — I hesitate to call it a “graphic novel,” since it lacks much of a plot — a kidney-beanlike alien naïf is sent to our world to “please find out abot the earbth creatures.” Jomny meets various insecure beings, and the text-lite encounters, written with intentional misspellings, are illustrated with minimalist black-and-white drawings. A wise owl is plagued with self-doubt; a fledgling artist-hedgehog thinks, “I suck, I am crap”; an onion reveals that if you peel back its layers you’ll find “just a smaller, mor afraid onion.”

  Think Wall-E meets E.T., Ziggy meets “Mork and Mindy.” The situational wisdom and one-liners the “aliebn” gleans about art, life, friendship and loneliness run alternately banal and poignant. Your Jomny-love may depend on your stomach for non sequiturs, cute animals and puns (a beaver says “dam business”; an otter thinks it’s an “auteur”) but also perhaps on your age. I grew up with “Peanuts” and “Calvin and Hobbes,” “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” and “Star Wars,” Monty Python and Shel Silverstein. Sun knows these forebears; in one of the best gags, a tree tells the alien it “learned to stop giving things” just because people “want somthing”, poking fun at Silverstein’s pop-philosophy classic “The Giving Tree.” Perhaps the appeal of “Gork” and “Everyone’s a Aliebn” is generational. To be sure, each peer group needs its silly fix, its revenge-of-the-nerds outsider triumph, its conquering dragon-Harry Potter mashup. So if these heroes speak to you, blast off with them.

  Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.”

  A version of this review appears in print on September 17, 2017, on Page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Misfit Creatures. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/gork-teenage-dragon-novel
  Word count: 966

  QUOTE:
  grown-up fable, a charming, though bloody, fairytale for adults, with enough explosions to satisfy the adolescent in us while making readers cheer for Gork in his determination to achieve his goal.
  Gork, The Teenage Dragon: A Novel
  Image of Gork, the Teenage Dragon: A novel
  Author(s):
  Gabe Hudson
  Release Date:
  July 10, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Knopf
  Pages:
  400
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Toni V. Sweeney
  “a grown-up fable, a charming, though bloody, fairytale for adults.”

  “There’s an old riddle that goes like this: What is the hardest part of a dragon’s life? Answer: Hatching.”

  Gork is about to discover that isn’t necessarily so.

  From the beginning, Gork is different from other dragons. In the first place, he’s an orphan, his parents dying when their ship crashed on Earth. Raised and educated by the ship Athenos, he is three years old when his grandfather, Dr. Terrible, takes him home to the dragon planet, Blegwethia

  “Maybe you’ll be surprised to learn we dragons have story-telling traditions of our own. Well get used to it. My name is Gork The Terrible (first name Gork, middle name The, last name Terrible). I’m a dragon. And this is my story.”

  On Blegwethia, Gork soon learns his differences put him at a disadvantage, especially as he grows into young adult dragonhood. His heart is much too large, making him have soft emotions. His horns are too short, barely two inches.

  “My horns are so small I couldn’t gore a flea.”

  He occasionally faints when overcome with excitement. His “Will to Power” ranking is 1 out of 1000 and his nickname is Weak Sauce.

  With youthful optimism, however, Gork is certain he’ll grow out of all these deficits. At the moment, he’s a senior at War Wings Academy for Planet Conquering, Epic Poetry Writing, and Gold Plundering for Draconum. It’s time for EggHarvest, and Gork is determined to ask Runcita Floop, daughter of the tyrant running the school, to be his queen. He can’t lose; he’s practiced before his mirror for three days.

  There’s extra pressure for Gork to get his queen.

  “If I don’t get an official queen by sundown today my rights as a dragon will be revoked. I’ll be demoted to slave status.”

  He’s going to have a difficult time because Runcita won’t stand still long enough for him to get near, much less speak to her.

  Gork is determined.

  In short order, he defies a security detail of dragon commandos, Dean Floop, various dragon bullies, and even his own grandfather, in his relay-race courtship of the lovely-scaled Runcita.

  “Me and my Queen Runcita will be laying plans for invading a planet together . . . on a Fertility Mission . . . and me and Runcita will be ‘bumping scales.’ As soon as she quits flapping her beak with her villanous dad, Dean Floop, my Queen Quest will be over. Runcita will be wearing my crown in a jiffy.”

  Occasionally helping Gork in his pursuit is Fribby, his best friend, a cybernetic dragon.

  “Fribby looks like your typical Dragobot, but she isn’t from the Servant Class. She’s the first generation of a new dragon species produced by the Creative Evolution Lab. She’s what’s called a MortalMachine, produced from Dragon DNA.”

  Not everyone likes MortalMachines, or the ordinary Dragobots, either. Dr. Terrible hates them, but Gork doesn’t . . . but then, he’s different.

  Braving bullies, handsome dragon cadets with seven-foot horns spiraling skyward, a vicious Dean Floop, and even his own grandfather’s nefarious plotting, Gork persists in his goal of find Runcita and offering her his crown, making her his queen.

  Somewhere along the line, however, things change.

  Gork will discover what he needs and what he wants aren’t always the same thing. He’ll also learn of his own parents’ hopes, and gain insight into what it truly means to be a dragon, even a dragon with a too-big heart and too-small horns.

  “What can I say? My big heart just isn’t cut out for conquering and enslaving and whatnot. Ranking systems and power indexes be damned.”

  In a cross between a dragon version of Ferris Buehler’s Day Off and the Expendables, this single day in the life of teenage dragon Gork is by turns amusing, thought provoking, and a bit shocking. Though a good many sentences begin with “But,” and “And” and there are many descriptions of “scaly green asses,” and “black hearts,” who are we to become grammar police?

  Perhaps this is the way dragons talk.

  Gork’s minor diatribe against Beowulf, Tolkien, et al who’ve vilified dragons, and his affinity and kinship with Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield may bring about some changes in thinking among the drakophobes in the audience.

  It’s a grown-up fable, a charming, though bloody, fairytale for adults, with enough explosions to satisfy the adolescent in us while making readers cheer for Gork in his determination to achieve his goal. Though “delightful” may not be the proper description for Gork the Teenage Dragon, this tale of one dragon’s quest for happiness and the lengths he goes to in achieving it is, nevertheless, exactly that, and more.

  Toni V. Sweeney is the author of The Adventures of Sinbad and The Kan Ingan Archives series and also writes under the pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone.

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