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Index: Books & Publishing

On social disorder.

Friday, 19 August 2011

Gerald Gaus: Our increasingly pluralistic societies are characterized by a variety of what the American philosopher John Rawls called ‘comprehensive doctrines’. We disagree about the aims of life, the place of humans in the universe, and whether we have a relation to a God, and what that relation might be.

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What happened to the game?

Wednesday, 17 August 2011

Geoffrey Norman: Pointless and depressing to run through the scandals and the tawdry revelations about the game, every one of which has its own book. Too much is known about steroids, gambling, loveless sex and the rest. Too little about the games. There are no Red Smiths who can make you care about the sport. We are invited, instead, to ponder the wreckage of, say, José Canseco.

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• Teresa Calder’s DNA in history, culture, and language.

Monday, 8 August 2011

I grew up with history as a personal companion, not an abstract idea. I won’t recount the losses and horrors. It was a complicated history, too. We became Protestants, my brother later converted to Judaism. When his cantor greets me, it’s in Polish with an admonition—“Why aren’t you speaking Polish to me?!”

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• Charles Bernstein’s ‘official verse culture’ enemies list.

Thursday, 4 August 2011

[The New York Times’] Tillinghast’s comments merely celebrated the “middle class, middle brow lifestyle” represented in so much of contemporary poetry as opposed to a “continuation of those literary and humanist traditions that have something more at stake,” in short, writing and thinking like Williams’s. Speaking out against what he perceived as a dominance of this “official verse culture,” Bernstein drew a line in the sand that put him in strong opposition to many of the most revered publishers and advocates of poetry.

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‘Fog everywhere.’ In fiction writing, the long decline of description.

Monday, 1 August 2011

I asked two book editors I know, who have been editing (and reading) fiction professionally for decades, if there is less descriptive language in fiction today. Both said, generally, yes, and both mentioned movies as a reason.

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Marcel Proust as heterosexual Christian moralizer.

Sunday, 31 July 2011

Elliott Coleman: ‘I think it may be shown that Proust is more Christian than anything else. And further, it seems to me that in his unflagging and almost undeviating search for meaning, reality, and rightness of interpretation, his work becomes highly moral, judged by any system of affirmative morality: peculiarly so in the Western sense of the truth’s making us free, illumined, whole, and productive. For Proust the process was this: remembrance, contemporaneous realization, then art.’

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Excerpts & Passages, Portfolios, Principal Articles, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)

John Ashbery’s illumination of a mercurial adolescent.

Saturday, 30 July 2011

Martin Sorrell: The translations made by an American octogenarian of a mercurial French adolescent bring us as close as we are likely to get in English to the wellspring of his genius. The distance in age and place between poet and translator is a happy irony. Ashbery’s Illuminations are set to become classic.

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• Undangle that preposition! commands F.L. Lucas, a master of style.

Wednesday, 27 July 2011

F. L. Lucas wrote the best book on prose composition for the not-so-simple reason that, in the modern era, he was the smartest, most cultivated man to turn his energies to the task.

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• In Baltimore, closing Borders is a routine part of the book business.

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

At the time of the Charles Street closing, Leinwall told a reporter, “The world will go on, I assure you. This will not affect the course of human nature or of human life.”

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• Anthony Trollope’s future-world: steam bowlers, hair ‘phones, and euthanasia.

Monday, 25 July 2011

Trollope is best known for his Barsetshire novels and there is no finer or more subtle chronicler of English landed society during the 19th century. But he is less well known for The Fixed Period, the piece of speculative fiction he published in the very same year as Vice Versa…

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≡ Prêt à poetry in the Surgeons’ Hall.

Sunday, 24 July 2011

Michelene Wandor: This has been a rare moment of public protest among atomised artists, as all writers are.

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· Digging a David Foster Wallace novel out of a couple of Trader Joe’s sacks.

Wednesday, 20 July 2011

The scrum of material—all of which will eventually be deposited with Wallace’s papers at the University of Texas—contained “false starts, lists of names, plot ideas, instructions to himself” but no outline, “no list of scenes, no designated opening or closing point, nothing that could be called a set of directions or instructions.”

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Summer Serial 2011: ‘Golden-beak’.

Sunday, 17 July 2011

The New York Times: ‘Golden-beak’ tells of a feather-headed American woman, Mrs. Yosinde [sic] Potwin, who has a Japanese boy as man-of-all-work. Temechici [sic] falls in love with this mistress. He is the last of the Shoguns, a Prince in disguise. Temechici has, with other heroic traits, a talent for the improvising of sandwiches. But he is of a jealous disposition. One night he enters Mrs. Potwin’s room…
– The New York Times.

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· Catch-22: How pension plans are like bombing runs.

Wednesday, 13 July 2011

Catch-22 nears 50: Four days after the novel was published, the New York Times reported: “Saigon – the quiet, tropical capital of South Vietnam – is suddenly teeming with American officers.” But, the article continued, “United States spokesmen insist it is only coincidence”.

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· Spinning-off Harry Potter: the ‘cultural dark matter’ created by fans of fan-fiction.

Friday, 8 July 2011

Nobody makes money from fan fiction, but whether anybody loses money on fan fiction is a separate question. The people who create the works that fan fiction borrows from are sharply divided on it. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer have given Harry Potter and Twilight fan fiction their blessing; if anything, fan fiction has acted as a viral marketing agent for their work.

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