Kent Haruf, One of Our Finest Writers, Close to Completing a New Novel

So I’m loathe to do any literary name-dropping but in this case I think it’s worthy: Yesterday I had lunch with Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong (1999, a finalist for and should have won the National Book Award), and Eventide (2004, for my money even better than Plainsong, both knockouts), among others. He’s a great guy, soft spoken, modest, and self-effacing. Which is all important because I rank him as one of our best contemporary fiction writers, up there with Cormac McCarthy, and it’s a pleasure to meet a major writer who is not a stuffy egomaniac. He lives near Salida, Colorado, and we talked about living in the mountains, our shared annoyance of ATV riders. He said he’s close to being done with a new novel, and I would bet it will be good, too.