William Shunn : Page 4

Joseph Smith's "capital" idea

As I was working through the very final set of revisions on The Accidental Terrorist, I had to hunt down the original source of a well-known Joseph Smith quote on the topic of the accuracy of the Bible. I found...  read

My prescient and fiery memoir cover shoot

We had no idea that what we were really doing was a cover shoot for my memoir. It was the late summer of 1987. I was stationed with my assigned mission companion, Elder Tim Bishop, in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. We...  read

Please help me "Close the Book" on my memoir project!

My sixteen-year quest to publish my memoir The Accidental Terrorist is nearly over. I feel like I've been fighting my way down the field all that time, sometimes making progress, sometimes getting stopped cold, sometimes losing big ground. But now...  read

The Falcon and the Snowman and me

In 1985, I was a far bigger fan of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny than just about any other musician. The album that infected me was 1982's Offramp, which sounded unlike anything else I'd ever heard. I became a hardcore consumer...  read

Send your missionary a margarita!

In a message exchange a few months ago, a friend and former colleague from my missionary days reminded me of a funny story from 1988 involving the elder who was then my companion. I didn't immediately recall the incident, but...  read

Our memories remind us, maybe mine is not so bad

I've always believed that I have a pretty good memory—in particular, that I can recall formative events and conversations from years or even decades ago in reasonably good detail. When I started work on my memoir The Accidental Terrorist, I...  read

What David Mitchell is up to in “The Bone Clocks”

This post about The Bone Clocks contains mild spoilers. When grappling with works of genre fiction, most mainstream literary critics can be counted on to demonstrate a peculiar tone-deafness. Take the case of The New Yorker's James Woods, who calls...  read

Readings on two consecutive nights

I'll be appearing next week in not one but two of Chicago's most electric reading series—or "live lit," as we call it 'round these parts. They'll be on consecutive nights, no less, so please block out April 16 and 17...  read

Supercalifornication; or, how a hooker came between me and Oingo Boingo

The following story is an outtake from my memoir The Accidental Terrorist. The names of most of the other participants, including relatives, have been changed to offer some small measure of concealment. When I was eighteen, my father and I...  read

Le mot juiced

I read the following essay, which appears in somewhat different form in the epilogue to The Accidental Terrorist, in the Essay Fiesta series at The Book Cellar in Chicago, on December 21, 2009. There is no worse feeling than, five...  read
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About Sinister Regard

Sinister Regard is a small independent press based in New York City. We publish fiction and memoirs in handsome print and electronic editions.