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"  Daniel Woodrell has a square face, a mossy goatee, and an unblinking stare -- a lingering reminder of his previous life: high school dropout, marine, hot-tar roofer, grunt laborer. These days, he spends his time hunched over a keyboard, banging out dark novels set against the backdrop of the Ozarks in Missouri, books so good they make me clench my fists in jealousy and wonder, both at his talent and because nobody seems to have heard of him. But that may be about to change -- at least in movie theaters. Two of his recent novels, Winter&amp;#039;s Bone and Give Us a Kiss, are being developed for film. At last, perhaps, he&amp;#039;ll get the attention he deserves. At last, more people may buy his books.  Pick one up and you&amp;#039;ll find blood and hay, barbed wire and whiskey. A Ziploc bag of crank. You&amp;#039;ll find barroom brawls and trailer-park meth labs. Guns. A stripper with peroxide-blond hair, her Missouri dialect like a mouthful of bees and honey. These are books for men. And despite the roughness of the content, Woodrell has a poet&amp;#039;s sense of how to turn a phrase. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it&amp;#039;s been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom....&amp;quot; So begins Tomato Red, with a first line that spans nearly a page, hissing and screaming like a kind of wheezy music.  So do yourself a favor. Don&amp;#039;t wait for Hollywood. Seek him out now, throw down fifteen bucks, and bend your face to the page. You&amp;#039;ll come away as I do -- darkly changed, begging for another.   This story is part of our second annual register of emerging ideas, trends, discoveries, products, people, and obscene gestures you should know about before everyone else does. &amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt; Read Previous * [Back to Esquire 100] * Read Next &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3392/ozarks1007/>