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Bad trip | Blog about Rudolph Wurlitzer’s cult novel Nog
I don’t know man. I think I should have loved Nog, Rudolph Wurlitzer’s 1969 cult novel. Nog is druggy, abject, gross, and shot-through with surreal despair, a Beat ride across the USA. Wurlitzter’s...
View ArticleThoughts on George Saunders’ new short story “Love Letter,” a thought...
George Saunders has a new short story called “Love Letter” in this week’s New Yorker. The story takes the form of a letter composed on “February 22, 202_” by an unnamed grandfather (“GPa”) to his...
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“Dreams like machines in the head”| A review of NYRB’s new Anna Kavan anthology
Machines in the Head, new from NYRB, compiles twenty-three Anna Kavan stories that were originally published between 1940 and 1975, as well as one previously unpublished story. The stories here,...
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Blog about Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge
I finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s 2013 novel Bleeding Edge a few minutes before I started typing up this blog. I’d jotted down a few notes as I was reading the book over the past two weeks, thinking...
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Blog about some recent reading
From bottom to top: I finally started Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia last week. I took the book with me to a place we rented near Black Mountain, North Carolina for a week. I purposefully took only...
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I haven’t written a review in sixty days–
—and even then I didn’t even label it even, the non-review, as a “review” —- what was it, sixty days ago?—a thing on Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Bleeding Edge which I managed to pound out in time for...
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On Fran Ross’s postmodern picaresque novel Oreo
Fran Ross’s 1974 novel Oreo is an overlooked masterpiece of postmodern literature, a delicious satire of the contemporary world that riffs on race, identity, patriarchy, and so much more. Oreo is a...
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A review of Edition 69, a collection of interwar pornophilic Czech surrealism
New from Twisted Spoon Press, Edition 69 collects three previously-untranslated volumes of Czech artist and writer Jindřich Štyrský’s private-press books of the same name. Beginning in 1931, Štyrský...
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Blog about blogging for fourteen years (and not blogging so much lately)
Yesterday afternoon, prepping notes for an evening class, I recalled that this blog Biblioklept turned fourteen. I was typing out some notes for an American literature class I teach (and have taught...
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On Walker Percy’s postmodern Gothic novel Lancelot
Walker Percy’s 1977 novel Lancelot opens with an invitation: “Come into my cell. Make yourself at home.” The invitation is to both the reader and to the titular Lancelot’s audience of one, a friend...
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On The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s existential novel of sad little happinesses...
I jumped enthusiastically into Walker Percy’s first novel The Moviegoer (1961) last week. I read his fourth novel Lancelot (1977) earlier this month. I loved Lancelot. I did not love The Moviegoer....
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Don DeLillo’s new book The Silence is a slim disappointment
Don DeLillo’s latest fiction The Silence is set on Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. The story, such as it is, takes place over the course of a few hours, focusing primarily on five characters who...
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A review of William Melvin Kelley’s polyglossic postmodern novel Dunfords...
William Melvin Kelley’s final novel Dunfords Travels Everywhere was published in 1970 to mixed reviews and then languished out of print for half a century. Formally and conceptually challenging,...
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Behind God’s back | On Thulani Davis’s poetry collection Nothing but the Music
Here are the first lines of Thulani Davis’s 1978 poem “Mecca Flats 1907”: On this landscape Like a thin air Hard to breathe Behind God’s back I see the doors I wanted to underline the line Behind...
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A review of Leonora Carrington’s surreal novel The Hearing Trumpet
Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet begins with its nonagenarian narrator forced into a retirement home and ends in an ecstatic post-apocalyptic utopia “peopled with cats, werewolves, bees...
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Ann Quin’s novel Passages collapses hierarchies of center and margin
Ann Quin’s third novel Passages (1969) ostensibly tells the story of an unnamed woman and unnamed man traveling through an unnamed country in search of the woman’s brother, who may or may not be dead....
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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse, Part I
I am rereading Donald Barthelme’s 1981 collection Sixty Stories. I am reading the stories in reverse chronological order. This reverse reading came about in this way: I read an intense, shocking,...
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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse, Part III
I am rereading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, starting with the sixtieth story and working my way to the first. I wrote about stories 60-55 here and stories 54-49 here, This post covers stories...
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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse, Part IV
I am rereading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, starting with the sixtieth story and working my way to the first and writing about it. Previous entries: Stories 60-55 Stories 54-49 Stories 48-43 This...
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Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories in reverse, Part VI
I am rereading Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, starting with the sixtieth story and working my way to the first and writing about it. Previous entries: Stories 60-55 Stories 54-49 Stories 48-43...
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