Mark Trainer

So maybe the short story is dead, or maybe it's the hottest thing this season.  But here's a writer who gets the most out of the form and probably doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the market and his platform.

Jones spent 10 years creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, "The Known World," in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax publication. "The Waiting Room" is still locked up tight in his mind, though he dictates the opening and closing three times in a row, down to the dashes and commas, without so much as blinking.

Here in Washington, dumping on the beleaguered Washington Post seems to be a favorite pastime.  But this profile of Edward Jones is a rare convergence of a subject worthy of profiling, a journalist up to the task of doing it right, and a paper willing to give a good story enough room.

I've not read James Ellroy, but this interview by my friend Jon Fasman has me primed. What an intriguing manner Ellroy has: the deliberate tone, the halting emphasis, the bow tie, for god's sake.  I know it's all about the writing, but I wish there were more authors who had Ellroy's sense of odd panache.  You used to see Truman Capote and Norman Mailer acting weird on talk shows.  I miss those days.