Letters to Emma Bowlcut

After years of writing songs and singing them into the space in front of him, Bill Callahan has written a book of fiction with a nameless protagonist to go out into that space as well. Letters to Emma Bowlcut is just that, collecting sixty-two letters from a boy to a girl. It is in fact one side of the story, and as such is a meditation on solitude, at times tracing a relationship but mainly making the expressions of a person's soul secrets that are too difficult to impart face to face. Callahan captures the sensual and esoteric qualities of letter correspondence that cannot be duplicated by any fancy digital technologies - your emails, texts, and the IM. Damn all this modern convenience! To paraphrase an old adage of the entertainment industry, when fact meets fiction, print the legend. Where comedy meets poetry, print the prose.