The first edition of William Burroughs' first novel, published under a pseudonym..
The economist Brad DeLong puts forth an interesting “parlor game” on his blog: write the worst blurb you can imagine for the best book you can think of. It’s an illuminating exercise, because it helps one realize a couple of things. One, that “literary” is really a perceptive filter, a sort of lighting effect that casts a work as somehow Important. Two, that even works of high literature are propelled by plots. When you strip them down to that level, some ethereal classics have rather down-to-earth dynamics at their core.
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06.04.09 §
(The text of my remarks on David Foster Wallace, delivered January 31 at the Koret Auditorium. This was part of the San Francisco Public Library’s Writers Remembered, an annual tribute to writers who passed away in the previous year.)
David Foster Wallace didn’t just bring his own style, he brought his own relationship to words. He didn’t arrange them, like pretty things, on the page. He was not a tour guide, ushering us through neatly trimmed, topiary wordscapes. Asking us to admire them from the path.
A David Foster Wallace wordscape is a sort of wilderness, through which you can find yourself staggering, careening, losing the line of horizon. But rather than feel abandoned by a careless author, full of himself and overwriting, you get the sense that the Wallace himself is undergoing a process of discovery, of chance orientation and disorientation, very similar to yours. The territory bears his name, but it is mapless. There is creation, but there are no pretenses of control. read more »
02.18.09 §
Cynthia Ozick calls Alice Munro “our Chekhov”, and I couldn’t agree more. Not only am I amazed that she hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet, I’m amazed that hordes of dazzled, appreciative readers haven’t gathered in the Ontario countryside, woven their own Nobel Prize out of roots and branches, and presented it to her door. It’s a deep pleasure to come across a collection of Munro stories that you haven’t read yet, as I did last week with The Progress of Love, first published in 1986.
There’s one fascinating element I find myself noticing in these stories—and now that I look, in other Munro stories as well. It’s just one facet of her talent (and I’m sure there are PhD theses on it) but worth noting nonetheless. read more »
02.16.09 §
“The fire spoke, chattering like a madman, and then quieted again in a helix of sparks. My friend, so still and copper-outlined in the dark, said something so softly that I cannot, even more than thirty years later, hear what it was.”
This is a passage that displays at least three facets of Andy’s world-class chops–probably more, but here’s what struck me about it upon a recent reading: read more »
02.13.09 §
