Arkansas

Arkansas Razorbacks Athletic Oxford Long Sleeve T-Shirt (Small, Athletic Oxford)
$19.99
The Soffe Oxford Grey Long Sleeve T-Shirt with College Screen Print is the perfect way to show school spirt when the weather starts to turn cool.

Arkansas
$14.00
Arkansas is a book that is unapologetic about breaking rules. It's full of unimportant details, irrelevant backstories with dialogues that don't always move the plot, a narrator who speaks in third person, but also in second, and then finally in first. Arkansas throws you off center, destroys your sense of balance. It makes you struggle and curse at your own inability to determine who exactly the good guy is.

And yet, you tolerate it. You tolerate it because it's different, because you can tell it's doing something new, just like Robert O'Conner's 'Buffalo Soldiers.' The same old elements are being combined in ways you never thought were possible, in ways that aren't fair. You're just starting to get hopelessly disoriented, pissed off, fed up, when John Brandon switches to second person. You. `You, Ken Hovan,' he says, and suddenly you don't get to be a confused reader anymore, but rather a confused character, inside the book, and you're not just watching the action, but in fact, you're the mastermind, the Godfather, the drug dealer who is responsible for everything. It's all your doing. Your fault. Your problem.

Once that happens, it's harder to put down. You want to know what it is that you, Ken Hovan, have been up to. So what is this book about? Objectively, it's about a bunch of drug dealers, criminals, and murderers who clearly weren't meant to be drug dealers, criminals, or murderers. They're too smart or too dumb, too sensitive or too insensitive, too comical and too harmless for the brutal, twisted, and gross things that they do. They like to cook. They have families. They fantasize and exercise and waste time in front of the tube.

You expect whores, torture scenes, overdoses and big cities from drug dealer books. You don't expect hilarity, mythical characters, meta moments, or philosophizing, and Brandon gives you all of those things. And then he does more; he gives you failure, and loss, and hurt, but not in a mushy gushy, call-you-mom-and-tell-her-you-love-her way. Instead he gives them to you in a choking, empty, silent way, a way that makes you question what you're doing here, and why you're doing it. `What's the plan for you two? You know, in life?' someone asks of one of the central characters, Swin. `We try to keep the meat on the bones and keep the bones moving,' he says, as if it's all that simple.

And when you're stuck in the middle of Arkansas, when you're alone there and trying to figure out what the hell is happening to you, and to the people around you, and to the life you've constructed, you start to think that maybe it is. Maybe it is that simple. Maybe it is that sad. Characters here feel what everyone has felt some point, guilty `to have life and not know what to do with it.' Some of them have ideals, but most of them don't. They get caught up, purely by luck, in the right things (friendship, tentatively, and love, vaguely) and, also by chance, in the wrong things. Somehow or another, that's what we all do- we fall into and out of things - while we ramble around in this confusing world, trying to keep the meat on the bones and keep the bones moving.

Meanwhile Brandon keeps coming back to the main man - you - and telling you how you feel. You (as the character) are an omniscient presence in the book, the Head Honcho, God, but you (as the reader) are also under Brandon's direction, at his mercy. "You can acknowledge the injustice and the absurdity of life," he says, "while never getting weighed down by these things." You realize that it's true. You can read this book without letting it keep you awake at night, but you can't read it without feeling its effects, now and then, when you go about performing your own mundane routine, dissecting your own predictable life. I couldn't relate to the drug deals, the murders, the being-a-fugitive-in-a-park. But I could relate to that one central question, and that, for me, was enough.

Arkansas Off the Beaten Path, 9th: A Guide to Unique Places (Off the Beaten Path Series)
$14.95
With this easy-to-use guide in hand, you¡Çll discover the hidden Arkansas. Seven maps and twelve black-and-white illustrations keep you on track, whether you¡Çre visiting unknown caves or scoping out a not-to-be missed (but unfamiliar) restaurant.

Arkansas Off the Beaten Path, 8th (Insiders' Guide Series)
$13.95
Travel guides mention the large cities and restaurants, but this book mentions the interesting side trips with their true taste of Arkansas restaurants and lesser known sights to see. It made our trip very enjoyable.