I read this weekend Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, and came across a scene with a structure I’ve been noticing a lot lately. Or a kind of structural move I for whatever reason am these days more attuned to. It’s about 23 percent of the way through the novel (thanks, Kindle!). Hans is on a train up [...]
:: Read on
Who? O.B. Hardison, Jr., former head of the Folger Library who for a long time had a poetry prize named for him. Who knew he was so smart when it came to the essay? That he was so spot-on re the essay’s history, style, approach, and reach? To wit: [T]he early essay [of Montaigne and [...]
I. Books Slow, here. I finished Didion’s Blue Nights this morning, which was a breeze to read through. It’s too soon for me to articulate how or why, but it seemed in this book that her mantric style and the brevity of the chapters did something to the grief running throughout that’s different from what [...]
:: Read on
(Continued from yesterday.) II. They will not help you in the work you have to do regardless of how you understand that work. If you have decided for your work that a faithful adherence to the factual record is your best strategy, conservative arguments will not tell you how to adhere to that record. Nor [...]
:: Read on
This is an insider post. For the majority of you unencumbered by this debate that’s been going on, I’ll point you here. Everyone else keep reading. N.B.: I’ve been pretty sick this week, and in the midst of being sick I’ve been in the midst of a large annual conference of writers. I. The glaring, [...]
To end the chiefly spiteful/sickly BlogWeek on a positive note, The Cupboard has just release its latest volume: Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it Notes. This was the winner of our first-ever contest, and it’s also (essentially) our first-ever work of nonfiction. A happy union. It’s about a person who may be real and a [...]
:: Read on
From the end of the fall term until last week, I read 1Q84 (pronounced, right?, /kyoo-teen/ eighty-four?), and I regret the time spent on it. It’s 925 pages. By the end I felt I’d wasted a lot of good hours on a book that should have been 325 pages. Is it a problem with late-career [...]
:: Read on
If you go to the Amazon page for The Authentic Animal, you’ll find that the book has all of three customer reviews. One of them calls the voice of its author “arrogant” and who am I to judge? The problem is the number of reviews, not their star-rating. I’d like to think we all can [...]
(An old one, found in a notepad I’ve since filled and checked to see what was throwawayable.) Taxidermy introduces you to an animal you’d never get to know otherwise. The New York Review of Books summaries books you’d never find the time to read. Nonfiction brings you closer to people you’d never meet face-to-face. Each [...]
:: Read on
(No.) (Playing at magazine-cover headlines. Playing a game called “Be The Atlantic Monthly”.) In the current (Summer [?!?] 2011) issue of Creative Nonfiction, Gutkind chats with Susan Orlean in a sushi restaurant in Greenwich Village, because why not do this? Here’s what she has to say about memoirs, the indisputable bread-and-butter of the CNF empire: [...]
I. Two Fridays ago I got four wisdom teeth removed (this just two days after an artificial tooth I’ve always had fell out) and it essentially wiped a week out of my life. I mean I was alive and awake, but I spent it on a sofa in pain or a haze. I taught two [...]
:: Read on
I’ve known Tim for several years now, ever since I moved to Nebraska and met him there, this onetime UNL undergrad who was then coming out with his second novel while also editing an Omaha alt-weekly. Now, his fourth novel has just been released from Unbridled Books. The Coffins of Little Hope is about a [...]
:: Read on
I finished Ulysses yesterday. It feels good, mostly to be able to now move on to other more engaging books. If you’ve been thinking about reading it, just know that it’s tough. I got very little visceral joy out of reading it. None of the feeling that I was with the story. It was more [...]
:: Read on
Just received over email Booklist’s advance review of The Authentic Animal: The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy. Madden, Dave (Author) Aug 2011. 288 p. St. Martin’s, hardcover, $26.99. (9780312643713). 579.4. When you think about taxidermy, you probably think of it as a creepy hobby of a bygone era (fancied by [...]
I’ve been thinking today about book reviews. The Atlantic thinks they’re no longer as relevant as they once were, and everyone’s been complaining since the Nineties probably about diminishing pages of newspapers’ books sections. Who cares where books get reviewed, right? And I used to care how thoroughly books got reviewed, like wordcount-wise, but I’ve [...]
The basic premise of Judt’s great book is that the West is in a very bad way and this is because of its ever growing inequality. The rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. The solution is a retooling of the conversations we have around public policy. He’s for social democracy. Social [...]
:: Read on
I don’t think I want my work to be as dense and lyric as that of Anne Carson, and I don’t think I want it to be as open and accessible as Johnny Carson. On the Carson-Carson scale of literary accessibility I think I’m like a Rachel?
:: Read on
What is waiting for me on my doorstep when I get home from the bar? Past the flannel planes and blacktop skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly [...]
:: Read on
Here’s J. Robert Lennon, whose blog, Ward Six, written with his wife, Rhian Ellis, is a routine landing spot in my browsing: Listen carefully here, writers, because this is important. Content. Do not post reports on how many people came to your reading or what nice things book reviewers said about you. This is called [...]
From the 7 Feb 2011 New Yorker‘s Briefly Noted review section: Bird Cloud, by Annie Proulx (Scribner; $26). Proulx’s memoir chronicles her years-long quest to build a “final home” in the harsh Wyoming landscape that has provided a setting for much of her fiction. The project is plagued by obstacles, and Proulx’s enthusiasm is fickle. [...]
:: Read on
