More Edgecombe-connected talent going big time: Ben Fountain’s new book getting global attention/approval:

This has been worked out here before. Ben Fountain is not actually from Edgecombe County but his people are. Some of them back to the 18th Century. His father was from the Edgecombe side of Rocky Mount; his grandfather from Leggett. (Compare him to Magic Johnson in this respect.)

He’s also said to be the best writer from Texas since Larry McMurty and Cormac Mcarthy; author of the 8^th best novel of the 21^st Century; and a “genius.” (Joe Smith says, “I don’t know about ‘8^th best in the century”, but it is a good book.”)

So it is well for Edgecombe to claim him.

Last week, the New York Times published a favorable review of his latest book. The Times’ review is written by Amanda Carpenter, a former staff member for Senators Jim DeMint and Ted Cruz. And, so did the Washington Post in a review by Robert Kaiser.

The book is Beautiful Country Burn Again.

Two weeks ago, Bill Moyers said, “this is the boldest, bravest and most bracing book about politics that I have read this year,” and published a long interview in which Fountain talks briefly about his Edgecombe County forbears, before plunging forward to today and “the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation, a creature comprised of degenerate political logic.”

Carpenter credits Fountain with saying that “the rich and powerful peddle a mirage of the American dream for everyone else to lust after rather than doing anything to help them achieve it.”

Fountain says, “our most successful politicians have all become fantasy novelists.” Carpenter says, “no wonder Fountain is sending such a flare shot. They’re invading his turf.”