Joe David Bellamy

The Lost Saranac Interviews
What if you could spend an exclusive week with today's most celebrated authors, discussing writing, literature, and how to develop your craft? This book takes you back in time to one of the most stimulating writing environments of the past thirty years.
Interviews with Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, John Hawkes, Gail Godwin, Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, William Kittredge, Rosellen Brown, Jayne Anne Phillips, Russell Banks, and others.

The Bellamys of Early Virginia
"The particular Bellamys I am writing about here arrived in the New World very early on, certainly no later than 1710 and possibly as early as 1634. It was a time of great upheaval in England, from whence they came, and we do not know expressly why they came. But there are a number of likely reasons...." Joe David Bellamy's book-in-progress provides the historical background as well as the hard evidence for a clearer understanding of this quintessentially American family. It is based on more than a decade of original research into the genealogy and family history of the early Bellamys in areas of Virginia where many of the vital records were destroyed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. This book cites numerous previously undiscovered sources, corrects many misconceptions, and puts forth compelling suggestions for further research. For an advance look at a 30-page excerpt from the book, click on the title The Bellamys of Early Virginia above.

Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the Millennium
Part memoir, part critique, part impassioned defense of American literary culture and the values it espouses and struggles to uphold, Literary Luxuries offers unforgettable commentary on the literary life in the United States during the last decades of the twentieth century.

"Joe David Bellamy is one of the rarest of American breeds--a critic with a diamond-bright prose style and a heart of gleaming gold. Time and again as you read these pages, you want to call him up and compare notes or have him over for dinner and stay up late cracking walnuts and drinking sweet wine, listening to his stories.... If you daydream about living the writer's life, if you love literary gossip and books, by all means pick this one up. It's a jewel."
--Carolyn See, The Washigton Post

"Literary Luxuries is a linked gathering of essays presenting, from lively and provocative points of view, a history and a vision of contemporary writing and culture, an authentic firsthand account of the literary life in our age.... From first to last, we hear Bellamy's voice, and it is the voice of the author and its lively consistency that give this book its undeniable integrity."
--George Garrett

Atomic Love
"Atomic Love is a collection of stories so passionately committed to the truth, to art and reality, that it will stop at nothing, give everything. Brilliant and devastating, these stories illuminate, like love, a ground zero of the heart. They are unforgettable."
--Kelly Cherry

"This is fiction of the highest quality--finely written, moving, adventurous in subject matter and approach, convincing in its depiction of character and situation, and demonstrating a keen knowledge of human motives and desires."
--T. Alan Broughton

Suzi Sinzinnati
"Wait a minute: we've got a likable hero and a lovable heroine, and they actually get together. And enjoy it. Joe David Bellamy's gentle, nostalgic, and funny love story gives us what so much of today's stingy fiction does not: warmth, redemption, and the very good news that happy endings are indeed one of life's options."
--T. Coraghessan Boyle

"A comic fantasy of romance on the rebound, Joe David Bellamy's novel is also a wonderfully engaging and intelligent look at a certain young age in the life of a country and a man. I read it without stopping."
--Lorrie Moore

"This is a wise, funny, and touching novel about American life--a lovely book. Bellamy's Suzi Sinzinnati is the girl of your dreams."
--Frederick Exley

The Frozen Sea
"These are intelligent and intelligently written poems, which I have read with pleasure. I like the way the images and metaphors rise out of the circumstances of the poems themselves, as the poems rise directly out of experience, making a high degree of integration and naturalness in the development of ideas and feelings, a sense that these structures of language evolve without contrivance, which is what Yeats said we all have to work so hard to achieve. Anyone who has wrestled with the recalcitrance of diction and syntax will recognize the mastery in these poems. These are fine pieces of work."
--Hayden Carruth

"I've enjoyed The Frozen Sea very much. The poems on the heart are fine, and I particularly love 'The Moth's Attraction to the Light'--I'm glad to know what moths are doing. It also has something to say about a man's sometimes obsessive attraction to a woman, or women...he's heading for the moon!"
--Robert Bly

Olympic Gold Medalist
"These poems astonish me with their physicality, incredibly sensuous poems about running, and, of all things, heart surgery.... Power. Pure power of sensuous language.... I kept thinking about the runner watching his father's heart surgery...and the mesmerizing descriptions of reality in these astonishingly sensuous physical poems."
--Diane Wakoski

"Bellamy's vision is of earthly forms in a continual condition of dynamic portent, the solidity of objects masking capacities that are stunningly explosive and apocalyptical. His crackling diction breaks down illusions regarding the safety of the reality in which we are housed, revealing the precariousness of all things."
--Michael Benedikt

American Poetry Observed
Twenty-six major American poets lead us to a clearer understanding of their elusive craft and, in the process, reveal a great deal about themselves. The poets interviewed include: Ai, John Ashbery, Marvin Bell, Michael Benedikt, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, James Dickey, Michael S. Harper, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, Josephine Miles, Adrienne Rich, May Sarton, Charles Simic, W. D. Snodgrass, William Stafford, Mark Strand, James Tate, David Wagoner, Diane Wakoski, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright.

"A poet is one who keeps alive an intense awareness of the wilderness inside oneself that can never be domesticated, notes Stanley Kunitz in one of these interviews. How numerous poets have managed to nourish that awareness is brought out as they discuss their craft, what impels them to write, how the words come to them.... Several of the interviewers are themselves poets, so the talks are lively and informed."
--Publishers Weekly

The New Fiction
An exploration of transformations of sensibility, language, and formal and technical modes in American fiction of the 60s and 70s, including original interviews with John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, Tom Wolfe, John Hawkes, Susan Sontag, Ishmael Reed, Jerzy Kosinski, John Gardner, Ronald Sukenick, and Kurt Vonnegut.

"A fine series of interviews...that are both entertaining and revealing in their own right; altogether they present a fairly inclusive compendium of current aesthetic theories and the practitioners' ideas on the future state of the art.... Individually these interviews are as fine as those featured in The Paris Review; collectively they are even more valuable as testimony to the vitality of a kind of writing presumed to be dying only ten years ago."
--Kirkus Reviews

"These discussions, which are carefully polished without losing their vitality and spontaneity, reveal a healthy variety of approaches among contemporary American writers. Bellamy's awe for the mystique of the avant-garde is frequently undercut by the expression of some old-fashioned opinions about the nature and purposes of art. Students of modern American fiction will find this volume most useful."
--Library Journal