The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has been on a spending spree for years, purchasing the papers of literary titans like James Agee, Norman Mailer, and Don DeLillo (among innumerable others). Now, they’ve added David Foster Wallace’s sprawling scribblings to their collection, much of it available online. Highlights include a [...]
The great lit Web site The Rumpus has an intriguing piece about the late, great Barry Hannah. Apparently he was a bit of a WWII buff and gave a lecture at Bennington entitled “Military History as Regards Fiction: The Unquenchable Thirst about World War II.” Man, what I would’ve given to have been there. Brooklyn writer [...]
Quite possibly the most brazenly insubordinate and thought-provoking book I have read since Walter Benjamin‘s landmark essay “The Work of Art In the Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” is David Shields’s highly hyped “manifesto,” Reality Hunger. (Inverted sentence structure intended, BTW.) I don’t know if I am yet prepared to follow Shields into the novels-are-not-really-novels wilderness, [...]
Not the “best,” necessarily, but these are the novels, I think, which will cast the longest shadows to the writers of the future. 2000 Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2001 Tie: Ian McEwan, Atonement; Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections 2002 Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex 2003 James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (now that we [...]
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