John Haskell is the author of the story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock, and the novel, American Purgatorio, to which he applied the "page 69 test" and reported the following:I don't have the book in front of me, but I'll guess page 69 comes during a section called Luxuria, which means lust. At that point a man, travelling in a car, is about half way across the country, and it's similar to the rest of the book in that he's looking for his wife, trying to avoid the fact that she may be dead and that he may be dead. Because this particular part of the book is about sexual desire, it's different than the rest of the book, but because the entire book is about desire, it's not that different.Read an excerpt from American Purgatorio and visit John Haskell's website.
Haskell's work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, and Ploughshares; he is a contributor to the NPR radio program The Next Big Thing.
Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.
--Marshal Zeringue
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