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Steve Earle has released ten critically-acclaimed albums since his 1986 debut Guitar Town made him an overnight star. A prolonged struggle with drug addiction resulted in a spell in jail in the early 1990s. since his recovery, his comeback albums, beginning with the 1995 Grammy-nominated Train a Comin', have all been critical and commercial successes. His latest album is Transcendental Blues. Earle also works on behalf of a number of political and social causes which have been the subjects of his songs for years. He serves as a board member of an organisation that seeks to abolish the death penalty and is also active in anti-landmine and welfare rights movements.
The Texan-born author of this first collection of short stories, Steve Earle, is already known to millions on both sides of the Atlantic as a best-selling guitarist and songwriter. His chequered career has included drug addiction and a term in prison as well as hit records, and Doghouse Roses leans heavily on the more colourful aspects of its author's past life for its inspiration. Though Earle casts his net wide and uses many different voices, quite a number of the stories included here might be classed as inconsequential, concerned more with delivering a 'slice of life' than having the rounded shape of a classic tale. Yet some of these are among the most needlingly perceptive in the book, closely observed studies that lose no time in getting under the reader's skin and use much the same affectionate scrutiny with which John Steinbeck viewed his cheerful no-hopers in Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. 'Wheeler County', for example, is simply an account of the lost years spent in a one-horse Texas town by a musician named Harley Watts (does Earle really not know the name of the Rolling Stones' drummer?), while the title story deals with a day in the life of a country-rock singer sliding fast down the far side of the success curve thanks to his dependence on class A drugs. What redeems these potentially trivial and depressing stories, as well as their author's obvious charm and charisma, is their empathetic power to take the reader with them from start to finish. This is a rare gift, and makes Doghouse Roses an involving book of unusual power. (Kirkus UK)
