Quarterly Conversation

Every Morpheme Counts: The Sam Lipsyte Interview

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 07:53:49 +0000

Lipsyte: Well these were the famous classes that he taught and others have written about it. He would kind of perform an amazing monologue for hours that would be a work of art in and of itself, in the way it was constructed in real time and kept pulling threads through and weaving all these elements together, but the content of it would be reflections on writing and art and what it is to be an artist and how one should approach the page. And then at the end of that—and that could go for...

PROPOSAL FOR TALK ON “GRANTS, PROPOSALS, AND QUERIES,” TO BE DELIVERED AT THE 2010 AWP CONFERENCE, THURSDAY, APRIL 8, COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER, STREET LEVEL, ROOM 203, 9:00 AM

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 07:42:29 +0000

In the brief essay that J.C. Hallman will deliver at a panel discussion at the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Hallman will offer up his own insights as to the nature of this admittedly flawed practice. The essay will be, to some extent, experimental. It will have a self-referential quality, it will aspire to innovation, indeed it will even be accurate to describe it as "meta-," but of course Hallman will use none of these terms, though he would like to. Book proposals are not places for...

Comedic Laments: The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:22:30 +0000

The Cry of the Sloth Sam Savage. Coffee House Press. $14.95, 224 pp. “He paced to and fro, sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often making his own woe a theme of scornful merriment.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Christmas Banquet In Sam Savage’s The Cry of the Sloth we are stuck with Andrew Whittaker, literary magazine [...]

To Write About Real Englishness: The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:14:31 +0000

In The Man in the Wooden Hat, Hong Kong is a sleepy city in the process of coming into its own. Grand new towers rise above streets packed with peasants pulling handcarts, and "street music play[s] against the racket of the mahjong players on every open balcony." As in Wong Kar Wai's film In the Mood for Love, Gardam's Hong Kong attains a sensual, slightly seamy elegance, and it is rife with both repressed erotic tension and opportunities for adventurous indulgence.

Hurry Home, Honey; Take Your Time, Love: The Poetry of Sawako Nakayasu

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:12:33 +0000

The elusiveness of it (along with the hovering-ness of balconies, the kinesis of molecules in general and hockey in specific, and the missing of letters, of interpretation, of other human beings that one is in love with) is the subject of Sawako Nakayasu's latest collection, Hurry Home Honey: Love Poems 1994–2004. It, for the author, is ungraspable, and so she writes from the slant of time, some past or future she anchors to in order to slip close enough to the elusive moment of which she is...

Photographic Poems: Catch Light by Sarah O’Brien

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:11:19 +0000

Sarah O'Brien's debut book, the National Poetry Series–winning Catch Light, takes photography as its ostensible subject and vocabulary. Photography, importantly, and not photographs.

Shelly Jackson: The Writer Whose Medium Is Reality

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:08:05 +0000

Shelley Jackson has had a multifaceted career that has taken her along the intersections of print and electronic literature, the avant-garde, and into new experimental forms of publishing. She's influenced an entire generation of electronic writers who continue to dissect and reinvent previous assumptions about the Web, print, and beyond.

Herta Müller’s The Passport

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:47:13 +0000

In Herta Müller's short novel The Passport we move through a series of vignettes filled with thickets of opaque and mystifying images. A story begins to emerge. A man is trying to get a passport which will allow his family to return home to West Germany. He is a member of an isolated and oppressed community of East German Romanians living under a stifling communist dictatorship. Living behind the Berlin Wall they are stranded and mostly unseen by the Western world, victims of Stalin's...

Devotion to the Book: Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:35:38 +0000

Rex's narrative structure—consisting of twelve "commentaries" written some time after the events have occurred, and addressed to J.'s former student Petya—offers an initial clue that it is not a straightforward novel. As becomes evident, J. is not really concerned with relating what has happened. Rather, he seizes upon the events as a series of "teaching moments," ostensibly to instruct Petya, but, one suspects, really intended as a way for J. to come to terms with the trajectory...

A Sensual Anti-Novel: Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:34:58 +0000

In grappling with Peter Bush's recent re-translation of Juan Goytisolo's 1974 novel Juan the Landless, I kept wondering why we read at all. Goytisolo's book is notoriously challenging: there's no real punctuation save frequent colons, and the book is full of shifting protagonists and pronouns and constant pressure on the language, as though Goytisolo aims to make the text itself implode. So why do we read, and what can be said about a book seemingly created to subvert the entire act of reading?