Jason Headley

This book is meant to be a humorous meditation aimed at those who enjoy the humor of say…Saturday Night Live. I have been to Jason Headley’s website before and there are many funny short videos, stories and essays.

While the sentiment is basically – Shake it off – there is language that may offend some folks. I completely get the attitude though as many times, 98% of the time it’s at work, there are people you just want to shake…or curse….or wonder why you have given 29 years to state government and yet your experience and education are completely ignored on many important issues.

Whew – I guess that hit close to home!

The photos are lovely, calm scenes you would expect to see in motivational posters. The message is to take a deep breath and don’t let the bastards get you down. Leave the frustrations behind when you clock out for the day or when you have an unpleasant social or family engagement. I totally get it.

If you would like to check out Jason Headley’s website you’ll find more tongue in cheek humor, not all of it is R rated.

I received this book complimentary from Blogging for Books program. All opinions are my own.… (altro)

Breath In. F*cks Out.

(Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for review through Blogging for Books.)

-- 3.5 stars --

In the vein of such classics as Go the Fuck to Sleep and You Have to Fucking Eat, F*ck That: An Honest Meditation is a humorous little picture book for adults - just, say, yogis or members of the self-help set vs. parents. Or, let's be honest: anyone who's ever spent time on the internet, because two minutes online will most certainly make you want to choke a motherfucker.

Headley juxtaposes profanity-laden meditations with lovely nature photography to create a beautiful and surprisingly soothing picture book.

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It's cute and silly and good for a few giggles...and maybe also handy to keep on hand for those days when the world seems to be conspiring against you and you just can't even with this shit anymore. I suspect it'd make a nice gag gift or stocking stuffer for both the cynics and New Age types in your life, which isn't a demographic that overlaps very often, I don't think.

That said, Headley's meditations get a little flowery at times (e.g., "Free of calamity created by every last ranch hand at the fuckup farm."). While I give him mucho points for creativity in cursing, I would've rather seen him stick with simpler, more familiar phrases; ones that more easily slip off the tongue. Ones that could become mantras, easily repeated in times of stress. Or maybe I'm just overthinking things?

http://www.easyvegan.info/2016/05/13/fuck-that-an-honest-meditation-by-jason-hea...… (altro)

This is my favorite kind of novel –- about a man who has made a mess of his life and his relationships and who reaches a crossroads that will test him to see if he’s capable of setting things right. Any fans of Nick Hornby, Tom Perrotta or Jonathan Tropper will surely like this novel, and Jason Headley more than holds his own with the masters of this particular kind of comic/dramatic literary fiction.

At the outset, Small Town Odds looks like it’s a going to be a redneck novel as it begins with a scene about an apparent loser who’s found himself in the drunk tank after a night of carousing and fighting in a small West Virginia town. But then we learn our hero, Eric Mercer, is much more than a drunken fool. He was actually a bright young high school student, who was headed to Brown University with scholarships after graduation. He was also a high school football player and after helping his team beat their rival school for the first time in 20 years, he became a local hero. At the time, he was dating a young girl who had moved into town a few years earlier, and whom he turned from a lackluster, indifferent student into college material. She was his first and great love. But she was away camping with her father the night of his big game, and when an older girl who’d been the object of his boyhood crush comes onto him they have a drunken one-night stand that leads to a pregnancy.

So that’s the dilemma of Eric’s life -– he gave up all his dreams for a bigger life to stay in the small West Virginia town he couldn’t wait to leave in order to help raise his daughter. He never got to close to the mother, even all his years of worshipping her from afar, because he felt she trapped him. While he hasn’t done much with his life since, other than working part-time at a funeral parlor and bar, he has been a good father to his daughter, Tess. But on the nights he doesn’t have her, he’s the town hellion, getting into fights to act out his rage over having to give up all his dreams.

The turning point comes when his ex-girlfriend, who is now on the verge of finishing law school, has to come back to town when her father dies. Over the past six years, he’s managed to avoid her any time she’s been home for a visit, but with his job at the funeral parlor he can’t this time.

That sets into motion all the action for the novel – and it’s told with chapters alternating between the present and the past so that we get more details about Eric’s high school heroics, his relationship with the girl who was the great love of his life, and the woman who would become the mother of his child. The pacing of the novel and the gradually unfolding of all the details are done with sheer brilliance.
It’s also a great comic novel. Eric covers his disappointment in himself with sarcasm and his lines are very funny – but they call come across like the things a witty person could actually say – and not the kind of over-the-top witticisms that someone could only come up with if they had a team of comedy writers constantly at their disposal.

This is the kind of novel that had me smiling on every page, it was such a sheer joy to read. All the minor characters are terrific, including the fathers, the girlfriends, and the mothers. Eric’s best friend, the dimwitted but loyal Deke, provides a great comic foil.

What’s particularly masterful is the way the author manages to get us to sympathize with his protagonist through all his conflicts with his friends, parents and the women in his life because the author doesn’t overdo it by always stacking the cards in Eric’s favor. At times Eric is very unlikable, and it’s hard not to be angry with him, as his family and friends surely are, for the choices he makes. But through it all you still understand why he is behaving at times so abysmally and irresponsibly.

The novel makes you want to keep turning the pages as it gets you wondering whether Eric will be able to rekindle things with the great love of his life, or if he’ll ever manage to find any forgiveness and affection in his heart for his daughter’s mother. I couldn’t wait to see what would happen (as much as I didn’t want the novel to end), but then I was blown away at how the author manages to find the ending that was exactly right for the novel. Obviously, I can’t recommend this novel highly enough.

If you end up liking it as much as I did, and are looking for more novels like it, I can recommend any of the works by the authors I mentioned above and also Drew Perry’s This Is Just Exactly Like You and Dallas Hudgens’ 2 novels, The Season of Gene and Drive Like Hell.
I was curious to see what Jason Headley was up to now, and his website makes clear he’s done some scriptwriting and he’s written and directed some very funny short films that are on his Web site. I hope he returns to novel writing again at some point because this debut novel supplies evidence of an immense talent.

… (altro)

This is an absolutely terrific novel. Set in a small West Virginia town during the years of Prohibition, it's about a married couple who are bootleggers, bringing in moonshine or "likker" as they call it from Kentucky when the Great Depression left them with few other choices for how to make a living. The story is told with chapters alternating between the perspective of Bessie, the wife, and Harlan, the government official or "revenuer" who is charged with breaking up sills and bringing bootleggers to justice.

While told from their perspectives, Bessie's husband Vance is really the star of the show. He is a terrific character. A taciturn man with a dark past he doesn't like to talk about, he is devoted to Bessie and thriving because after failing at every other job he tried -- including farming and auto mechanics -- transporting likker escaping the pursuit of revenuers is the only thing he's ever been good at. As laconic at Vance he is, he can turn on the charm and charisma whenever he needs to in order to transact a business deal and he has a funny and cutting with, so he has a lot of great lines when he is up against the characters who share the small town where he and Bessie lives, including the dog catcher who snatches their dog every time they're on a liquor run and the speakeasy drunk who hits on his wife every time Vance steps away from her to transact business with his supplier partners. Harlan plays the great Ahab role -- as the man determined to land a big-time bootlegger to make his career with the government.

Bessie is a terrific character as well. She's not as perfect as well -- she regularly gets drunk on the moonshine, even though Lance never touches it. While she would like Vance to talk more and open up about his feelings, she's wise enough to understand his love through the small ways he always show his devotion to.

They're always on the edge of getting caught by Harlan, and that cat and mouse game adds a fun level of suspense to a novel that offers a great character story and an intriguing look at a time when people had to struggle to get enough food on their plates to avoid malnutrition.

With this and Small Town Odds, Headley had written two novels that rank among my all-time favorites.

By the way as of May 2013, this novel hadn't been published. The author previously made it available on his web site. While it wasn't posted there when I went looking for it, he kindly shared it with me and I was extremely grateful he did.
… (altro)