Have Words–Will Write 'Em

I’m Joe Peschel, a freelance writer, critic, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. I’ve written for The Boston Globe, The Barnes & Noble Review, The News & Observer (Raleigh, N. C.), The Charlotte Observer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and The Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Have Words—Will Write ’Em is my first shot at a blog. It’s not my first website, though. I have a literary website on the very site, josephpeschel.com, where you’re reading this blog. Maybe you’ve come here from there. If you have, don’t click the above link. In a previous incarnation, I was a computer journalist, geek, and hacker. I ran a website called D.O.E. SysWorks. As a computer journalist, I wrote for InfoWorld and PC World, a couple of the biggest computer magazines in the country. I’ve written for some of the smallest ones, too, names you’ve probably never heard of like PC Upgrade, Computer Buyer’s Guide and Handbook, Maximize, and the Microcomputer Journal.

But back to Have Words—Will Write ’Em. The title, as you probably know, comes from an old TV western about a soldier of fortune named Paladin, a freelance gunfighter, who was fond of quoting Shakespeare, John Donne, and Dryden, and musing about philosophy. The title seems to me an apt one for the blog of a freelancer; my weapon isn’t a .45 firing bullets, but a keyboard firing words. I promise to shoot no one__at least not literally.

I plan to post my thoughts on and news about books, writing, and the writing life; maybe I’ll write a few blog-only book reviews and post some of my poems, too, actually light verse.

I review serious fiction, for the most part—novels and short story collections. I’ve written about books by Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus III, Joyce Carol Oates, Patrick Somerville, J. M. Coetzee, Paul Theroux, Allison Amend, Richard Bausch, T. C. Boyle, Robert Stone, Paul Auster, E. L. Doctorow, Jayne Anne Phillips, Philip Roth, and others. I’ve reviewed one non-fiction book but that was James Wood’s How Fiction Works, and I have a review of a memoir in the works.

If you’re a publicist and would like to send me a book to review, you should write to:

joe at josephpeschel dot com

Or:

joe_peschel at iw dot .net