Quarterly Conversation

Brodeck by Philippe Claudel

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:58:10 +0000

Brodeck: A Novel, Philippe Claudel (trans. John Cullen). Nan A. Talese. 336pp, $26.00. Throughout his ten-year writing career, Philippe Claudel has selected mental and emotional fragility as his preferred literary landscape. His two previous novels Les Ames Grises, 2003 (By A Slow River, 2006) and La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh, 2005, both examine the consequences [...]

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau edited by Damion Searls

admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:51:20 +0000

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Damion Searls. NYRB Classics. 700 pp, $22.95. Walden is surely one of the greatest American books. Whether we measure it by its influence on the lives of its readers, by the precision of its language, by the number of memorable sentences it contains, or by its sheer originality, [...]

The Ninth by Ferenc Barnás

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:23:35 +0000

The Ninth, Ferenc Barnás (trans. Paul Olchváry). Northwestern University Press. 174pp, $16.95. Telling a story from a child’s point of view is one of the most difficult modes of fiction to write successfully. The narrator of Ferenc Barnás’s The Ninth is a nine-year-old boy—The Ninth child of ten (eleven, counting the brother who died) in [...]

The Last Supper by Pawel Huelle

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:03:15 +0000

The Last Supper, Pawel Huelle (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones). Serpent’s Tale. 256pp, $14.95. The premise of Pawel Huelle’s novel is simple: An artist invites twelve of his friends to his studio in order to take a photo recreating Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” No one is told which disciple he is going to be; in fact, [...]

Kamby Bolongo Mean River by Robert Lopez

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:32:37 +0000

Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez. Dzanc Books. 177pp, $16.95. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. —Clov, from Endgame by Samuel Beckett In his second novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez once again taps a deeply comedic voice to record a [...]

Waste by Eugene Marten

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:07:32 +0000

Waste, Eugene Marten. Ellipsis Press. 132pp, $10.00. Eugene Marten’s Waste is blurbed up by the Lish School (including Lish himself) so I was expecting a quirkily written, intelligent effort more concerned with the structures of its sentences than narrative cohesion; what I got is a brutal, disturbing little novel that works beautifully both for those who [...]

A Jury of Her Peers by Elaine Showalter

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:51:13 +0000

A Jury of Her Peers, Elaine Showalter. Knopf. 608pp, $30.00. The title of Elaine Showalter’s book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx refers to a 1917 short story by Susan Glaspell that tells of two women who discover potentially incriminating evidence against another woman whose husband has been [...]

Comrades by Marco Antonio Flores

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:44:57 +0000

Comrades, Marco Antonio Flores (trans. Leona Nickless). Aflame Books. 300pp, $16.95. In 1976, the Guatemalan writer Marco Antonio Flores published his first novel, Los Compañeros. The book was a feverish, kaleidoscopic communiqué from inside the revolutionary armed struggle of his country, a movement in which he had been a devoted participant only a few years earlier. [...]

Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt

admin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:57:50 +0000

Ray of the Star, Laird Hunt. Coffee House Press. 192pp, $14.95. Ray of the Star opens with two nods in the direction of French writer Georges Perec. The first, a quotation from his 1967 novel A Man Asleep, serves as entry to the story: Now you must learn how to last. A man named Harry has [...]

Manifesto: New Aestheticism

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:28:49 +0000

(Editor’s note: This essay accompanies an interview with Damion Searls on new ways of looking at fiction.) Modest in aim, New Aestheticist art does not want to change the world—to bear witness, deconstruct, problematize. It does not batten onto greater social goals, the kind responsibly fundable with tax dollars. It wants merely to be beautiful. It differs [...]