{"id":117,"date":"2004-10-16T22:42:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-16T22:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=117"},"modified":"2004-10-16T22:42:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-16T22:42:00","slug":"the-bear-went-over-the-mountain-william-kotzwinkle-1996","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2004\/10\/the-bear-went-over-the-mountain-william-kotzwinkle-1996\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bear Went Over the Mountain &#8211; William Kotzwinkle, 1996."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Moore (whom I&#8217;ve never read&#8211;I just stumbled across his website) has a list of &#8220;funny books&#8221; he recommends, and I liked enough of the ones I knew to try ones I didn&#8217;t, like this one. A real bear and a failed novelist exchange lives accidentally. The bear finds the writer&#8217;s manuscript, gives himself the name &#8220;Hal Jam,&#8221; and heads to New York, where he&#8217;s an overnight success. We meet agent Chum Boykins, publisher Elliot Gadson, publicist Zou Zou Sharr, etc&#8230;all broad caricatures, literary phonies who see in Hal not a wild animal but a rough-hewn genius like Hemingway, their ticket to success. Meanwhile the writer is meeting weird country types like Vinal Pinette in the Maine Woods. There are flashes of laugh-out loud humor, especially the bear&#8217;s attempts at conversation (he learns a few words, which combined with emperor&#8217;s-new-clothes syndrome gets him as far), but basically it&#8217;s the meat of a mildly funny short story dragged out into a contrived novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Moore (whom I&#8217;ve never read&#8211;I just stumbled across his website) has a list of &#8220;funny books&#8221; he recommends, and I liked enough of the ones I knew to try ones I didn&#8217;t, like this one. A real bear and a failed novelist exchange lives accidentally. The bear finds the writer&#8217;s manuscript, gives himself the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}