Reviews | Quarterly Conversation

In Ransom, Malouf satisfyingly gives us a meeting between Priam and Achilles that builds from the interiority of Priam. The novel seems to want to teach the importance of doing something human to those who might never get around to picking up Homer or who, if they do, might wish they could get into the character's heads.

How Jeanette Winterson Makes Fiction

Winterson has always told and retold the same fictions: of parents and children; of origins, and adoptions; of differences, of margins; of love; of passion; she has always manipulated rhythm and language as an excavation of sources. Much of her fiction mirrors what we know of Winterson's own story, but she agitates against the idea that her work has to be considered as fiction or autobiography, laying claim to both. In Art Objects she writes: "The question put to the writer 'How much of this is based on your own experience?' is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing"; a "separate reality." At every turn she eludes the critic, the interviewer, the reader; she offers truth, but not the truth. "I'm telling you stories. Trust me."

Inveterate and Unrepentant Book Collecting: A Guide to My Favorite Contact Sport

It's difficult to pin down exactly why books as objects mean so much to me. I wasn't alive when William Goyen's excellent Come, The Restorer was published, but owning an original printing with the dust jacket—as it would have been purchased at the time of its release—makes the book more special to me than some beat-up paperback reissue. If it's signed, even more so. I'm only really interested in modern first editions (say, post-1950 or so)—before that books get quite expensive, but also I don't think they look as nice, since many were issued without dust jackets, and at that time the dust jacket wasn't considered a permanent part of the book, so they're often missing. So why the obsession and collecting, and why is it so important?

The Master of the Not Quite: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood

Wood can be harsh, yes, but he is seldom unfair. Wyatt Mason was wrong to accuse him of having suggested, by dint of a string of negative reviews, that no good contemporary literature exists. (He has written favorably of McEwan, Bolaño, Robinson, Ozick, Kirsch, Sebald, Roth, Saramago, Swift, Carey.) He never simply dismisses a writer (in the manor of, say, Dale Peck); on the contrary, his criticism, even at its most polemical and uncompromising, is inexplicably bound to larger concerns about the direction of contemporary fiction. Two major concerns have dominated James Wood's writing: realism and religion. In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, his first collection, newly available in paperback from Picador, these two concerns are beautifully imbricated, resulting in what is surely among the finest achievements in recent literary journalism.

A Warehouse with an Epic Scope: Entrepôt by Mark McMorris

To say that Mark McMorris's Entrepôt is about writing poetry is to do a huge disservice to this beautiful and penetrating book, whose ostensible subject of contemplation is how to live, love, and make do in a time of war, if not cultural crisis. On the other hand, the book's greatest service, at least to my eye, is in its exploration of just what it means to be a poet—I should be more specific and say a lyric poet—amid our contemporary terrors.

blog advertising is good for you

The Constant Conversation

A Taste of Cherry in a Heat Wave

I’ve been thinking a lot about heat waves. The thick summer weather has felt like a wall of fire that must be bravely pushed through to order to exit from an air conditioned office building and make my way to the corner to board a bus crowded with sweaty citizens. So perhaps it’s no surprise that [...]

The Ballad of David Markson

"What’s not so up for dispute is that Markson accomplished what, by all rights, should be a literary impossibility." (Colin Marshall for The Millions)

Gass-X

"Ich liebe dich. No sentence pronounced by a judge could be more threatening. It means that you are about to receive a gift you may not want." Via Dylan Suher, Greg Gerke's sort-of review of William H. Gass's Reading Rilke in BIG OTHER.

“Sands immense / Impart the oceanic sense,” Or, Daring to embark on Clarel

A fan of Herman Melville must have patience. He must appreciate digression and the dissolution of pattern or plan. He must enjoy the sheer rush of words, a proper Biblical torrent of them. And he must be able to find pleasure in philosophical dialogue as much as in wild anecdote. But must he read Clarel? Can [...]

Amazon’s Inability to Grasp Irony

This is just one small example.

Complete Thomas Bernhard in English: A Checklist with Pictures

Thomas Bernhard is certainly one of the major, titanic writers of any era, any country. Enormously influential, unremittingly bleak and pessimistic but never without a sense of humor, his style evolved into single-paragraphed philosophical rants extending hundreds of pages, the best of which are Woodcutters, ‘Walking’ (from Three Novellas), and Gathering Evidence. I have finally [...]

On Penguin 75

Ever since Penguin's 75th Anniversary roadtrip I have intended to address the somewhat simultaneous release of Penguin 75, a sort of vanity book of Penguin covers. This book is delightful, but flawed. Delightful, but misleading.

Let not the poets be your guide.

In The Unicorn Hunt (1993), the fifth book of Dorothy Dunnett’s cycle of historical novels of early Renaissance Europe, the House of Niccolo, Dunnett tells of the deficiencies of wealthy merchant Anselm Adorne’s relations with women thus: His wife Margriet could have warned him. He was familiar with motherly wives and the skittish ways of other [...]

Conversation with Ahsahta Press

Janet Holmes, director of Ahsahta Press, based at Boise State University in Idaho, took the time this week to share her thoughts on poetry publishing as part of my ongoing series of publisher profiles. Ahsahta publishes seven full-length collections of poetry a year, including recent works by Kate Greenstreet, Lisa Fishman, Rusty Morrison, and Julie Carr. Like some other small presses, Ahsahta offers a yearly subscription option, which is one of my favorite ways to buy poetry and encounter the work of many poets who are new to me, as well as poets whose newest books I always look forward to reading. Janet says more about this and what it's like to craft a press's identity and consistent aesthetic.

Not a spine-tingler, in the least

An unfortunate side effect to the lengthy transition of print to digital is our long suffering endurance of stale articles in mainstream media rehashing the same points as every other article in mainstream media.