Aram Saroyan & David Godine @ Skylight Books

Listen to Aram Saroyan, author of Door to the River, and publisher David R. Godine in conversation at Skylight Books in Los Angeles:

Aram Saroyan on Jim Carroll

from the article “Blue Galahad,” at Jacket Magazine

“Jim lent me a manuscript copy of The Basketball Diaries, which was still unpublished, albeit now legendary. The strongest impression I took away from that first reading was that in a certain light his heroin use was like the flipside of the strenuous physical and psychic demands of his life as a basketball scholarship boy. Near the end f the book there was a sequence about a Greenwich Village romance that seemed full of a quieter, richer light. When I read the book again nearly a decade later when it was finally published, I asked Jim about this missing part and he responded casually that it had been cut.”

Aram Saroyan is the author of the Black Sparrow Books title Door to the River: Essays & Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age

Door to the River Review

David Godine, a Boston publisher known, especially, for the production quality of his books, is brave to send this volume [Door to the River] out into the marketplace. It is a valuable record of a now vanished time when it was exciting and even rewarding to be a writer, to be, at least, a minor public figure, who could read his (and it was almost exclusively men who populated this rarified world) poems to an appreciative audience at Cafe le Metro off St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan.

The public cultural mix is lonelier, emptier, thinner and far less interesting now as we hunch up behind our glowing computer screens.

— from Daphne Abeel's review of Door to the River in The Armenian Mirror-Spectator