Kyle Jarrard (www.kylejarrard.com) is a former news and opinion editor at the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times in Paris, a novelist, poet, historian and jazz pianist.
His latest novel, "The Old World Dies" (January 2018), received a starred review from Kirkus, which noted: "An intoxicatingly unique literary voice that demands further attention." You can read the full text at https://goo.gl/D7Lbx9.
"The Old World Dies" is a comic satire on the final decline of France and the cleverly melodramatic adventures of a dreamy painter of nudes, his colorful models and spinster benefactors, an American swindler, an unlucky taxi driver, a savage teenage gang girl, and a well-lubricated cast of supporting actors, living or not, as they scurry through the great cultural and social collapse. The mad dash for the exits opens to the pleasant tinkling of sheep bells high in the Pyrenees where nature-struck Parisian artists wander through the fog looking for light to the bemusement of the Basque people, plunges into the Sturm und Drang of Paris where the well-heeled cower as suburban riffraff rush the walls and pet poodles take to speaking Portuguese, then swings out to sunny California and drinks with a con artist in a nice bar located on a dangerous coastal road, before arriving at a picture-postcard resort in Mexico where a beach artist dashes off paintings at sunset of those who, deserving or not, survived.
Jarrard published his first volume of poetry in February 2017. "Garden of Demise" is a labyrinthine drama of decline involving a sinking suburb, Medieval hermits, lost miners, Cretaceous oysters, butterfly collectors, Malthus, a dead addict, Siddhartha, a tanning salon, old graveclothes, the City of Light, two mammoths, a cat, several birds, a Magdalenian cave, an Elysian field, various wars, Ibsen, Napoleon, Rose, and a one-armed Christ.
Jarrard's first novel, "Over There," was published in 1997 by Baskerville, a literary house in Texas. Even before its publication, this first novel garnered intense interest, with Library Journal giving it a starred review and lauding its "epic proportions." Publishers Weekly called it "deliciously weird," noting how Jarrard "takes readers on a wild ride not just through time and space but through loopholes in language and meaning."
"Over There" draws its considerable power from a wide array of literary antecedents. Burroughs, Faulkner, Beckett, Walker Percy, Garcia Marquez, Flann O'Brien -- echoes of each master ripple beneath Jarrard's inventive prose. And yet the novelist's voice is truly his own, a hybrid blend of Texas matter-of-fact and continental hip that swings between off-the-wall hilarity and cut-to-the-bone pathos as it shifts from Texas to France to Mexico and back again in a neatly woven multivoiced story.
Jarrard's second novel, "Rolling the Bones," was published by another strong literary house, Steerforth Press, of Vermont, in 2001. This road book takes the reader into the depths of Mexico, where the editor who selected this manuscript, Michael Moore, heard echoes of Malcolm Lowry.
"Rolling the Bones" is the story of two Southern couples whose lives are set spinning off in unforeseen directions following the sudden death of one of their number amid their placid doings one Texas summer. Three narrators tell the story, relay-style, carrying the reader down the byways of Texas and Louisiana and Mexico as each searches for a way to escape the event.
Jarrard's French wife and her family are a major inspiration behind his first lengthy nonfiction work, "Cognac: The Seductive Saga of the World's Most Coveted Spirit." This history book, published by John Wiley & Sons, is the first complete history of this famous brandy, in which Jarrard brings to bear his 20-plus years in France and his intimate familiarity with the Cognac region and its unique artisans. (https://www.facebook.com/cognacbook/)
Jarrard charts Cognac's birth in the 1500s and its transformation into the world's most inimitable drink. Along the way, he reveals how Cognac distillers weathered vineyard die-offs, the German occupation, and other challenges over the years-and offers a behind-the-scenes look at Hennessy, R'my-Martin, Courvoisier, Martell and other legendary brands. "Cognac" joins the highly successful genre of very readable books about "things," with echoes of Mark Kurlansky's "Salt" and Mike Dash's "Tulipomania."
Frank Prial, wine critic of The New York Times, wrote of "Cognac": "An enthralling volume. Kyle Jarrard has put together a compelling story, not just about the world's best-known eau-de-vie, but about the people who make it and the often violent history of the remarkable but little-known region of France from which it comes."
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