Joe O’Connell, the Chronicle‘s film-industry columnist, is a man so often wrapped in old-school celluloid or awash in hi-def pixels by way of making a living, you’d think he had fuck-all time for anything else. He wouldn’t be the man to win an award for crafting an excellent prose novel, for instance. Except that he would. He’s the winner of the 2009 North Texas Book Festival Book Award in adult fiction, awarded on April 17, up there in Denton. His novel-in-stories, Evacuation Plan, published by Austin-based Dalton Publishing, reveals a segmented narrative of the terminally ill, the patients’ families, and those who care for the dying. His book’s an excellent, thought-provoking diversion from our own inevitable plummet toward the grave, and we highly recommend it to you, the living.
This article appears in April 17 • 2009.