Willy Vlautin:
A Jockey's Christmas

By: Dennis Cook Some artists have an unerring knack for etching the clear, rough lines of hard knock reality. Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin has long been one of these warts & all truth-tellers but in the past few years he's come into his own as a rich, poignant storyteller outside the concise bounds of a song. After delivering one of the fiercest emotional rides of 2008 with his sophomore novel, Northline, Vlautin has made a fantastic, amazingly unsentimental addition to the holiday can...

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