Winter 2007 Contributors

Bonus Articles

The latest articles published in between issues

In Homer’s Head: Ransom by David Malouf

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.

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