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How to Do Things Right

How to Do Things Right

The Revelations of a Fussy Man

by L. Rust Hills

$17.95 USD
$17.95 USD
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Format

Product Details

Godine

Softcover
ISBN: 978-0-87923-969-5
Pages: 272
Size: 2
Published: Septmeber 2004
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The three titles edited, revised and combined in this volume, How To Do Things Right, How to Retire at 41, and How to Be Good, will have you laughing out loud, thinking hard, and at least temporarily rearranging your frazzled life. Hills is wise, witty, and very, very funny. His mission is to create order out of chaos; to make the arcane methodology of fussiness respectable; to elevate, and even ennoble, those fleeting instincts we all harbor to get our lives in order. All aspects of life are examined here: from how to eat an ice-cream cone to how to develop "principles" when you have none. But behind the frivolous facade, Hills remains a deeply sage and serious writer, a modern combination of Robert Benchley, Henry David Thoreau, and Michel de Montaigne. This is his best advice, served up from the heart of one of the most charming humorists to grace the American scene.
A perfectly wonderful book, tight-assed in the very best sense...It is much harder to be funny than to be tragic, but you will find damn few people who will acknowledge this. The funnier you become, the more lightly people will regard you. May you become as light as helium. -- Kurt Vonnegut (from a letter to Rust Hills
Hills is preoccupied primarily [with] the little things . . . and he writes about them as felicitously, delicately, and gently as Benchley did. -- Nora Ephron, The New York Times
L. Rust Hills
Lawrence Rust Hills was an American author and fiction editor at Esquire from 1957 to 1964, though he remained associated with the magazine until 1999. Authors he championed include Norman Mailer, John Cheever, William Styron, Bruce Jay Friedman, William Gaddis, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Joy Williams, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and E. Annie Proulx. His 1972 book How To Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man was a set of humorous essays filled with obsessively-detailed instructions on, for example, the correct way to make and eat milk-toast. In 1974 he edited "Writer's Choice" a collection of short stories. The writers included picked their personal favorite of their own work. Contributors included Updike, Mailer, Capote, Southern, Barth and Roth.His 1979 book Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular outlined his views on short story craft. Hills attended Kenyon College for one year and received a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University in 1948 and 1949, respectively.