Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany [Hardcover]

For those who care about literature or simply love a good laugh (or both), Charles Portis has long been one of America’s most admired novelists. His 1968 novelTrue Gritis fixed in the contemporary canon, and four more have been hailed as comic masterpieces. For the first time, his other writings—journalism, travel stories, short fiction, memoir, and even a play—were brought together inEscape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, published in 2012 as his first new book in more than twenty years. This revised edition includes a new afterword by best-selling author Donna Tartt, who first published her remembrance in theNew York Timesfollowing Portis’s death in 2020.

All the familiar Portis elements are in this collection: picaresque adventures, deadpan humor, an expert eye for detail and keen ear for the spoken word, and encounters with oddball characters both real and imagined. The collection encompasses the breadth of his fifty-year writing career, from his gripping reportage of the civil rights movement for theNew York Herald Tribuneto a comic short story about the demise of journalism in the twenty-first century. His three-act play,Delray’s New Moon, was performed onstage in 1996 and published inEscape Velocityfor the first time.

Whether this is your first journey to the world of Portis or a long-awaited return to it, you’ll agree with critic Ron Rosenbaum—whose essay appears here alongside tributes by other writers—that Portis “will come to be regarded as the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain, a writer who captures the soul of America.”

Charles Portiswas born and raised in south Arkansas, graduating from Hamburg High School. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War, earned a journalism degree from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and became a lc|