Mary Ann Gwinn's Lit Life article in the Seattle Times looks at a local connection to the Google Books Project:

Peter Leonard is a doctoral student in Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington. He's bookish but is equally at home in the computer world (he has been the Webmaster at the UW's Simpson Center for the Humanities). He and a partner, UCLA professor Tim Tangherlini, have just received $45,000 from Google to create tools for large-scale literary analysis through Google Books, part of nearly $1 million Google has committed to support digital humanities research over the next two years.

At Boston.com, Joseph Peschel reviews Finny, by Justin Kramon:

In the unfolding of Finny’s life, Kramon shares with Dickens a primarily optimistic outlook: His major characters, especially Finny and Earl, mostly get what they deserve. “Finny’’ is lighter social commentary than “Copperfield,’’ but more relevant to the way we live today, the way we face death, disloyalty, and hardship. He’s not quite in Dickens’s league — who is? — but Kramon is a talented young author and “Finny’’ a worthy read, and a dickens of a first novel.

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles on Ayelet Waldman's Red Hook Road:

Waldman's sharp eye for social detail makes her particularly good with the loneliness and awkwardness of modern grief. The abandonment of all those fussy Victorian customs along with the loss of any common religious vocabulary leave her characters wandering in a boundless but unacknowledged cloud of sadness, resenting neighbors' nervous platitudes ("The Lord don't give us more than we can bear") and empty, earnest questions ("How are you doing?").

David Means's short-story collection The Spot is reviewed in the Los Angeles Times by David Ulin:

What can we know, Means is asking, except that, whether because of childhood illness or an act so thoughtless as to be unintended, loss is our inevitable due? Seen in those terms, there is no larger meaning, no orderly progression, no pattern by which the past leads into the present, which is why his writing holds time in such loose regard.

In the Book Bag column of the Howard County Times, Rebecca Oppenheimer on thrillers:

In his latest novel about a man just out of prison, following "Small Crimes" and "Pariah," Dave Zeltserman displays a genius for capturing the brute facts of survival "on the outside." Leonard is disarmingly sympathetic, which makes the novel's surprise conclusion even more disturbing.

And from The New Criterion's archives, here's Donna Rifkind on The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker, by Leslie Frewin:

In the end, Frewin’s biography, like Dorothy Parker herself, must be regarded as a victim of its own high-spirited irresponsibility and disappointed good intentions. Readers hoping for a substantial, finely tuned study of a complex writer, of which a book such as Elizabeth Frank’s recent Louise Bogan is representative, will have longer to wait. Frewin states at the end of his book that “Mrs. Parker . . . had spent her life searching for Dorothy Parker. She never found her.” Neither, unfortunately, has Leslie Frewin.

 

 

 

Keyword tags:

Critical Mass has been querying writers all summer to see what they're reading. Here's what 2008 Criticism finalist Richard Brody had to say:

An unusual run of work has cut into my pleasure reading, which, lately, I find myself doing mainly on the subway or in the “third place” of a café. This makes portability a priority, which is why my summer-reading plans involve a big, fat, heavy book that I’ve been impatient to read since it landed in my eager hands: The Genius, the hitherto-unpublished original 1911 version of Theodore Dreiser’s The “Genius”. I’ve always been troubled by the quotation marks with which Dreiser ultimately burdened his quasi-autobiographical protagonist, as if he considered his subject to be society’s view of the artist rather than the inspired artist himself. (Of course, the censorship that the book faced proved him, at least to some extent, to have been right.) At home, I’ve started to read the original, more inward portrait of the artist; it’s more sprawling and contradictory than the later version, as if the material of his life were poured onto the page with less shaping and more immediacy. Dreiser was, indeed, a genius both of immediate experience and of collective power, and I’m curious to see how the battle between them tilted in these earlier rounds. But the lovely and treasured volume (of which the University of Illinois Press should be proud) is big and heavy, far too bulky to schlep around the city except as a particularly self-punishing form of exercise. That’s why, if our family vacation comes off as planned, I intend to spend a good part of it on a chaise longue, in a rocker, or at a kitchen table, exulting vicariously in the strivings of a crude, blundering, yet determined and visionary young man—in a similarly harsh yet energetic era—in pursuit of art, money, and love.

Richard Brody was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award for Criticism for Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. He worked in various capacities in the film business (including documentary researcher, writer, and producer) and in advertising before writing and directing Liability Crisis, an independent feature film released in 1995. He began writing book reviews for The Forward in 1996 and started writing about cinema for The New Yorker in 1999. For the last five years he has been the magazine’s movie-listings editor; he also writes film reviews, a column about DVDs, and a blog about movies, The Front Row. (Photo: Alex Remnick.)

Keyword tags: richard brody, dreiser

How do you decide what to read next? Where are the reviewers you trust and pay attention to? The landscape changes daily. Do you read about books: online?
In print? In daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly publications? On the radio? On podcasts? Video? Word of mouth (if so, whose word?)

NBCC member Sharon Oard Warner, founder and director of the Taos Writers Conference in New Mexico, introduces Jane Ciabattari, president of the National Book Critics Circle, who discusses the constantly morphing state of book reviewing today.

 

Credit: Ann Huston
http://www.decoloresgallery.com/

Jane Ciabattari in Taos, NM on July 12, 2010 July 24, 2010, length: 46:07

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Join us for an NBCC Reads Conversation on Books about Conjugal Love at Book Passage in Corte Madera, August 4, 7 pm, with NBCC President, Jane Ciabattari, Balakian winner Molly Giles, NBCC members Meredith Maran and Greg Sarris. Included in the discussion will be Annie Dillard's THE MAYTREES, Jane Smiley's A PRIVATE LIFE, and Evan Connell's MR. BRIDGE and MRS. BRIDGE.

Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Boulevard
Corte Madera, CA 94925-1145
(415) 927-0960
 

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Join us for an NBCC Reads Conversation on Books about Conjugal Love at Book Passage in Corte Madera, August 4, 7 pm, with NBCC President, Jane Ciabattari, Balakian winner Molly Giles, NBCC members Meredith Maran and Greg Sarris. Included in the discussion will be Annie Dillard's THE MAYTREES, Jane Smiley's A PRIVATE LIFE, and Evan Connell's MR. BRIDGE and MRS. BRIDGE.

Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Boulevard
Corte Madera, CA 94925-1145
(415) 927-0960
 

Keyword tags:

Keyword tags:

How do you decide what to read next? Where are the reviewers you trust and pay attention to? The landscape changes daily. Do you read about books: online?
In print? In daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly publications? On the radio? On podcasts? Video? Word of mouth (if so, whose word?)

NBCC member Sharon Oard Warner, founder and director of the Taos Writers Conference in New Mexico, introduces Jane Ciabattari, president of the National Book Critics Circle, who discusses the constantly morphing state of book reviewing today.

 

Credit: Ann Huston
http://www.decoloresgallery.com/

Jane Ciabattari in Taos, NM on July 12, 2010 July 24, 2010, length: 46:07

Download

Keyword tags:

Keyword tags:

 

 

 

Adam Kirsch in Tablet on The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson:

Faith, it has been said, is the evidence of things not seen. By that definition, to believe in Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, requires no faith at all: It is far easier to see him today, anywhere in the world, than it was when he was actually alive…On YouTube, Chabad.org, and many other sites, you can hear the Rebbe talk about Torah and world events, watch him distribute dollar bills to guests (a practice that became his trademark), and witness some of his frequent visits to the grave of his predecessor, Yosef Yitzhak, the sixth Rebbe—the tomb, or tsiyen, where Schneerson himself now rests, in Queens, not far from JFK airport.

On NPR, Marueen Corrigan reviews Pearl Buck in China:

As Spurling deftly illustrates, that alienation gave Buck her stance as a writer, gracing her with the outsider vision needed to interpret one world to another. Buck's unconventional childhood also seems to have made her resistant to group think: In midlife, as a famous novelist, she made enemies criticizing the racism of the mission movement; she also shocked contemporaries by writing in her memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her brain-damaged daughter Carol, at a time when such children were quietly institutionalized and publicly forgotten.

In The Oregonian, David Beispiel talks Wordsworth:

Wordsworth's best writing values the second two lines' spontaneity and feel for common life. He emphasizes a correspondence between nature and the inner life -- with the self and the imagination supreme. This, alone, is his greatest argument against Pope's poetry of Augustan authority. For Wordsworth, poetry is not an argument -- as it was for Pope and George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet. Instead, poetry is a mood, an emotion and a way of feeling that distills experience. Wordsworth's definition of poetry, in fact, has come to dominate the thinking and the making of poetry in English for two centuries.

Colette Bancroft covers John Brandon's Citrus Country for the St. Petersburg Times:

Citrus County explores the consequences of that act on its characters' lives in ways that both surprise and ring true. Brandon draws his characters so deftly that we can be horrified and intrigued by them at once, and his plot just as deftly avoids cliches.

In Slate, Wendy Smith writes on Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector:

Allegra Goodman has rediscovered her sense of humor. Not that her new novellacks seriousness: With a plot propelled by the dotcom bubble and a principal character in the wrong place on 9/11, it tackles big, contemporary topics. But “The Cookbook Collector” takes a welcome step back from the dark brilliance of its predecessor,“Intuition.”A grim tale of possible fraud at a cancer research lab, that novel displayed all of Goodman's searching moral intelligence and virtually none of the wit or amused savoring of human folly found in such previous works as “Paradise Park” and “The Family Markowitz”. In her new novel, she works on a larger social canvas than ever before, armed with an awareness that to comprehend all the scheming and the sorrow, wit is indispensable.

Anis Shivani interviews Breathless in Bombay author Murzban Shroff:

In Shroff's stories, Mumbai is a city of corruption and caste division, just as much as it is a city of emerging meritocracy and class breakdown. Shroff's writing has little in common with the standard American short story's constriction, narcissism, and exhibitionism; the influence of Chekhov and other Russians clearly comes through in an expansive, restful melancholy, a metaphysic that is simultaneously hot and cool.

Michael O'Donnell covers two new books about l'affaire Dreyfus for The Washington Monthly:

If European fascism were a ladder, the Dreyfus affair would have its own rung. Situated between the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and the first echoes of the goose step, it ushered in the bloody new century with the cry of “Death to the Jews” and the smashing of store windows. Writing in 1951, Hannah Arendt marveled that “[n]either the first nor the second World War has been able to bury the [Dreyfus] affair in oblivion,” and observed, “Down to our times, the term anti-Dreyfusard can still serve as a recognized name for all that is anti-republican, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic.”

In The San Francisco Chronicle, Rayyan al-Shawaf reviews Megan Stack's Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War:

So moving are these stories, so passionately related by a traumatized journalist - Stack recently requested another posting, and is now the Los Angeles Times' Moscow bureau chief - that one might momentarily forget the distressing lack of originality in the author's conclusions.

Steven G. Kellman in the B&N Review about A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by Jerzy Pilch:

Pilch’s antic sensibility confirms that he is the compatriot of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish maestro of absurdist pranks. But readers with a taste for the fermented Irish blarney of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and John Kennedy Toole might also savor Pilch.

At Shelf Awareness, Harvey Freedenberg reviews Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall: Stories:

In its breadth and depth, Anthony Doerr's second collection--two novellas and four short stories--extends the impressive range displayed in his 2003 debut, The Shell Collector. Traversing settings from South Africa to Wyoming to Lithuania to suburban Cleveland, and time from the Holocaust to a near-term dystopian future, Doerr probes the subject of memory in evocative prose that enhances the richness of these consistently moving tales.

Keyword tags:

 

 

 

Adam Kirsch in Tablet on The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson:

Faith, it has been said, is the evidence of things not seen. By that definition, to believe in Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, requires no faith at all: It is far easier to see him today, anywhere in the world, than it was when he was actually alive…On YouTube, Chabad.org, and many other sites, you can hear the Rebbe talk about Torah and world events, watch him distribute dollar bills to guests (a practice that became his trademark), and witness some of his frequent visits to the grave of his predecessor, Yosef Yitzhak, the sixth Rebbe—the tomb, or tsiyen, where Schneerson himself now rests, in Queens, not far from JFK airport.

On NPR, Marueen Corrigan reviews Pearl Buck in China:

As Spurling deftly illustrates, that alienation gave Buck her stance as a writer, gracing her with the outsider vision needed to interpret one world to another. Buck's unconventional childhood also seems to have made her resistant to group think: In midlife, as a famous novelist, she made enemies criticizing the racism of the mission movement; she also shocked contemporaries by writing in her memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her brain-damaged daughter Carol, at a time when such children were quietly institutionalized and publicly forgotten.

In The Oregonian, David Beispiel talks Wordsworth:

Wordsworth's best writing values the second two lines' spontaneity and feel for common life. He emphasizes a correspondence between nature and the inner life -- with the self and the imagination supreme. This, alone, is his greatest argument against Pope's poetry of Augustan authority. For Wordsworth, poetry is not an argument -- as it was for Pope and George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet. Instead, poetry is a mood, an emotion and a way of feeling that distills experience. Wordsworth's definition of poetry, in fact, has come to dominate the thinking and the making of poetry in English for two centuries.

Colette Bancroft covers John Brandon's Citrus Country for the St. Petersburg Times:

Citrus County explores the consequences of that act on its characters' lives in ways that both surprise and ring true. Brandon draws his characters so deftly that we can be horrified and intrigued by them at once, and his plot just as deftly avoids cliches.

In Slate, Wendy Smith writes on Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector:

Allegra Goodman has rediscovered her sense of humor. Not that her new novellacks seriousness: With a plot propelled by the dotcom bubble and a principal character in the wrong place on 9/11, it tackles big, contemporary topics. But “The Cookbook Collector” takes a welcome step back from the dark brilliance of its predecessor,“Intuition.”A grim tale of possible fraud at a cancer research lab, that novel displayed all of Goodman's searching moral intelligence and virtually none of the wit or amused savoring of human folly found in such previous works as “Paradise Park” and “The Family Markowitz”. In her new novel, she works on a larger social canvas than ever before, armed with an awareness that to comprehend all the scheming and the sorrow, wit is indispensable.

Anis Shivani interviews Breathless in Bombay author Murzban Shroff:

In Shroff's stories, Mumbai is a city of corruption and caste division, just as much as it is a city of emerging meritocracy and class breakdown. Shroff's writing has little in common with the standard American short story's constriction, narcissism, and exhibitionism; the influence of Chekhov and other Russians clearly comes through in an expansive, restful melancholy, a metaphysic that is simultaneously hot and cool.

Michael O'Donnell covers two new books about l'affaire Dreyfus for The Washington Monthly:

If European fascism were a ladder, the Dreyfus affair would have its own rung. Situated between the Russian pogroms of the 1880s and the first echoes of the goose step, it ushered in the bloody new century with the cry of “Death to the Jews” and the smashing of store windows. Writing in 1951, Hannah Arendt marveled that “[n]either the first nor the second World War has been able to bury the [Dreyfus] affair in oblivion,” and observed, “Down to our times, the term anti-Dreyfusard can still serve as a recognized name for all that is anti-republican, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic.”

In The San Francisco Chronicle, Rayyan al-Shawaf reviews Megan Stack's Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War:

So moving are these stories, so passionately related by a traumatized journalist - Stack recently requested another posting, and is now the Los Angeles Times' Moscow bureau chief - that one might momentarily forget the distressing lack of originality in the author's conclusions.

Steven G. Kellman in the B&N Review about A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by Jerzy Pilch:

Pilch’s antic sensibility confirms that he is the compatriot of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish maestro of absurdist pranks. But readers with a taste for the fermented Irish blarney of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and John Kennedy Toole might also savor Pilch.

At Shelf Awareness, Harvey Freedenberg reviews Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall: Stories:

In its breadth and depth, Anthony Doerr's second collection--two novellas and four short stories--extends the impressive range displayed in his 2003 debut, The Shell Collector. Traversing settings from South Africa to Wyoming to Lithuania to suburban Cleveland, and time from the Holocaust to a near-term dystopian future, Doerr probes the subject of memory in evocative prose that enhances the richness of these consistently moving tales.

Keyword tags:

NBCC member Barbara Fister responds to the third question in our "Next Decade in Book Culture" series:

My answer to this question is a bit odd. My genre is crime fiction, and I read (and review) a lot of it. But within a genre that, to outsiders, seems formulaic—people get murdered, killers get caught—there is a huge variety, and for any one reader, it’s a challenge to discover the gems.

Once upon a time I would scribble lists of books to try based on reviews by Marilyn Stasio, who reviews a handful of mysteries for the New York Times Book Review every other week, but I quickly learned she’s either more catholic in her tastes or less picky; while her brief reviews were helpful, the books she approved of hit the spot less than half the time.

There are lots of mysteries published every year, and when Publishers Weekly and Library Journal cross my desk in the library where I work, I see whole constellations of stars, but those stars don’t align with my tastes. That perfect mix of vivid setting, excellent prose, and realistic characters who (as Chandler said) commit murder for a reason, is a tall order. And though the “big books” of the season get reviewed--over and over again--in newspapers and magazines, it’s harder to find serious reviews of crime fiction that are more than plot synopses in most mainstream media.

I found my fix in a reading group. Not your typical reading group, but one that has over a thousand members worldwide and lives on the Internet. It’s devoted to discovering and discussion mysteries, and it’s appropriately named “4MA” --for mystery addicts. One of its best qualities is that it’s a promotion-free zone. Authors may join, but they aren’t allowed to talk about their writing, and those who join to cross-promote friends’ books get the cold shoulder. Members vote on two books to read together every month, with a volunteer discussion leader, and at the end of the month people sum up what they’ve been reading and what they thought of it. These lists are a goldmine.

People tend to find their “reading twins” --readers who share similar tastes--and build their list of books to read based on their reviews. Social networking sites like LibraryThing and GoodReads fill a similar niche, but they are not as effective as 4MA at emptying one’s bank account and stuffing one’s shelves. At 4MA readers know the genre and read far beyond the bestseller list. They can explain what made a book work for them, and how it compares to other mysteries. I’ve also found myself moved by the place of reading in people’s lives. One member from Argentina told of her widowed grandmother emigrating years ago from Spain with two small children and a trunk full of books; another wrote that both her mother and grandmother read in secret because it was considered self-indulgent when there was work to be done.

I follow a number of blogs that review mysteries, and websites such as EuroCrime, Stop, You’re Killing Me, and Reviewing the Evidence are essential sources for mystery addicts. (Full disclosure: I contribute to Reviewing the Evidence.) But the word-of-mouth magic that publishers would kill for is alive and well at 4MA, where sharing reading experiences is an everyday practice.

Keyword tags:

NBCC member Barbara Fister responds to the third question in our "Next Decade in Book Culture" series:

My answer to this question is a bit odd. My genre is crime fiction, and I read (and review) a lot of it. But within a genre that, to outsiders, seems formulaic—people get murdered, killers get caught—there is a huge variety, and for any one reader, it’s a challenge to discover the gems.

Once upon a time I would scribble lists of books to try based on reviews by Marilyn Stasio, who reviews a handful of mysteries for the New York Times Book Review every other week, but I quickly learned she’s either more catholic in her tastes or less picky; while her brief reviews were helpful, the books she approved of hit the spot less than half the time.

There are lots of mysteries published every year, and when Publishers Weekly and Library Journal cross my desk in the library where I work, I see whole constellations of stars, but those stars don’t align with my tastes. That perfect mix of vivid setting, excellent prose, and realistic characters who (as Chandler said) commit murder for a reason, is a tall order. And though the “big books” of the season get reviewed--over and over again--in newspapers and magazines, it’s harder to find serious reviews of crime fiction that are more than plot synopses in most mainstream media.

I found my fix in a reading group. Not your typical reading group, but one that has over a thousand members worldwide and lives on the Internet. It’s devoted to discovering and discussion mysteries, and it’s appropriately named “4MA” --for mystery addicts. One of its best qualities is that it’s a promotion-free zone. Authors may join, but they aren’t allowed to talk about their writing, and those who join to cross-promote friends’ books get the cold shoulder. Members vote on two books to read together every month, with a volunteer discussion leader, and at the end of the month people sum up what they’ve been reading and what they thought of it. These lists are a goldmine.

People tend to find their “reading twins” --readers who share similar tastes--and build their list of books to read based on their reviews. Social networking sites like LibraryThing and GoodReads fill a similar niche, but they are not as effective as 4MA at emptying one’s bank account and stuffing one’s shelves. At 4MA readers know the genre and read far beyond the bestseller list. They can explain what made a book work for them, and how it compares to other mysteries. I’ve also found myself moved by the place of reading in people’s lives. One member from Argentina told of her widowed grandmother emigrating years ago from Spain with two small children and a trunk full of books; another wrote that both her mother and grandmother read in secret because it was considered self-indulgent when there was work to be done.

I follow a number of blogs that review mysteries, and websites such as EuroCrime, Stop, You’re Killing Me, and Reviewing the Evidence are essential sources for mystery addicts. (Full disclosure: I contribute to Reviewing the Evidence.) But the word-of-mouth magic that publishers would kill for is alive and well at 4MA, where sharing reading experiences is an everyday practice.

Keyword tags:

A book critic has so little time to devote to so many books that he can start to feel perpetually, hopelessly behind, like a college student staring despondently at a huge pile of required reading days before finals and knowing deep down inside that this semester is simply not going to end well. One always, always has to keep moving, with the result that the reason one got into the business in the first place—a love of books—can become a casualty, because the simple fact is that not many books—even good books—are masterpieces. And with so much to read, anything that isn’t a masterpiece can start to look dreary and obligatory.

But when they are!

Friends tell me that Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, is the most stolen galley of the year, that it disappears off of cubicles in newspapers and publishing houses throughout the land, that they are kept under lock and key at FSG—and boy can I see why. I read The Corrections years ago, when it came out, and I recalled the sensation of delight that that book gave me when reading this one. It’s so good that other novelists will find it in equal measure inspiring and intimidating. It’s so funny, so brilliant, and so good that the critic has to abandon his usual posture: there’s not even that much you can say about it—all you can do is gape in open-mouthed admiration. 

So this summer, I’m going to go back and read Franzen’s first two novels, Strong Motion and The Twenty-Seventh City. I know I’ll be just as sorry to put them down as I was when I turned the last page of The Corrections and Freedom—the kind of books that remind you what it was about books that made you decide against law school and embark on this uncertain profession of reading and writing.

Benjamin Moser was a finalist for the 2009 NBCC Award for Biography for Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. He is the New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar. He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was born in Houston and currently lives in the Netherlands. (Photograph: Tessa Posthuma de Boer)

Keyword tags: benjamin moser, jonathan franzen

A book critic has so little time to devote to so many books that he can start to feel perpetually, hopelessly behind, like a college student staring despondently at a huge pile of required reading days before finals and knowing deep down inside that this semester is simply not going to end well. One always, always has to keep moving, with the result that the reason one got into the business in the first place—a love of books—can become a casualty, because the simple fact is that not many books—even good books—are masterpieces. And with so much to read, anything that isn’t a masterpiece can start to look dreary and obligatory.

But when they are!

Friends tell me that Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, is the most stolen galley of the year, that it disappears off of cubicles in newspapers and publishing houses throughout the land, that they are kept under lock and key at FSG—and boy can I see why. I read The Corrections years ago, when it came out, and I recalled the sensation of delight that that book gave me when reading this one. It’s so good that other novelists will find it in equal measure inspiring and intimidating. It’s so funny, so brilliant, and so good that the critic has to abandon his usual posture: there’s not even that much you can say about it—all you can do is gape in open-mouthed admiration. 

So this summer, I’m going to go back and read Franzen’s first two novels, Strong Motion and The Twenty-Seventh City. I know I’ll be just as sorry to put them down as I was when I turned the last page of The Corrections and Freedom—the kind of books that remind you what it was about books that made you decide against law school and embark on this uncertain profession of reading and writing.

Benjamin Moser was a finalist for the 2009 NBCC Award for Biography for Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. He is the New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar. He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was born in Houston and currently lives in the Netherlands. (Photograph: Tessa Posthuma de Boer)

Keyword tags: benjamin moser, jonathan franzen

This post continues a series on Critical Mass featuring websites dedicated to book reviewing online. Read previous Q&As with The Rumpus, The Millions, The Quarterly Conversation, and Open Letters Monthly.

Since 2007, Three Percent has been reviewing translated books and commenting on works in translation. (The site's name refers to one reported estimate that only three percent of the books published in the United States are translations.) Headquartered at the University of Rochester, the site is connected to the school's translation program as well as its book publisher, Open Letter Books, which publishes one new work each month (readers can subscribe to the series). Chad W. Post, director of Three Percent and Open Letter, is the former associate director at Dalkey Archive Press and cofounder of Reading the World, a collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote international literature. He answered questions from NBCC board member Mark Athitakis about Three Percent via email.

What was the impetus for creating Three Percent? Were you mainly frustrated with the lack of books available in translation or with the lack of coverage those books were getting in review outlets? How much of it was it a natural extension of your work at Dalkey Archive Press and Reading the World?
 
There were a few different reasons for starting Three Percent. I came up with the idea shortly after leaving Dalkey Archive for the University of Rochester to help start a new publishing house doing exclusively literature in translations. Obviously, putting together a press (much less one at a university), takes a lot of time and even after we had figured out a lot of the details for Open Letter, we knew that the first book wouldn’t be out until September 2008 at the earliest. This was in May/June of 2007, and to me and my ADD, this seemed like an eternity. As you allude to in your question, during my time at Dalkey I was involved in a lot of translation-related stuff, including the Reading the World program. I have a great love of international literature, and I also have a great love of talking with book people. My time at Dalkey made me harshly aware of how many translations just slip through the cracks, receiving next to no review attention. Out of these myriad concerns—lack of review attention, desire to communicate with cool book people, my inability to sit still—Three Percent was born. Initially our idea (our senior editor E.J. Van Lanen was instrumental in getting TP going, including designing the site) was to have a daily blog aggregating info about literature in translation from around the world along with weekly book reviews. Something similar to what Michael Orthofer does at Complete Review/Literary Saloon. Over time this has expanded to include the “Translation Database” (so we can figure out exactly what new translations are coming out, from where, and what the real percentage is) and the Best Translated Book Awards.
 
How do you decide which books to review at Three Percent every month?
 
It’s a mixture of my interests and the interests of the reviewers who write for us. I personally enter all the info into the Translation Database, and while doing so, pick out titles that I’d like to at least take a look at. I tend to look for a mix of “big” translations (like the Bolano books, titles coming out from Dalkey or Archipelago, etc.) and more university and small press books. I particularly like when we can review something that I sort of know won’t be getting a lot of attention, but sounds fantastic because of the plot, style, or author’s life. Since our readers are pretty diverse—and international—and include a lot of publishing folks and translators, I feel like it’s part of our mission to seek out these books.  
 
Where do you draw your reviewers from? What skill sets do you look for when it comes to reviewing works in translation that might not be as common among other reviewers?
 
A number of our reviewers are either booksellers or translators. Or really well-read people who have a special interest in international literature. I guess that’s really the special thing about the people who review for Three Percent—they tend to know a lot more about international writers and are able to create a context for these books. 

What do you think drives the relative disinterest among mainstream review outlets to cover works in translation?
 
A few years ago, I was on a panel with Daniel Soar of the London Review of Books that focused on obstacles in publishing and promoting literature in translation. I remember that Daniel was really surprised when in preparing for the panel he looked back over recent issues of the LRB and noticed how few international books they’d reviewed. He had naturally—as had I to be honest—assumed that they were doing a pretty good job. I don’t think that reviewers—or book review editors—are opposed to covering international literature, I just think there are some contextual issues that make it more difficult. For one, the vast majority of translations (about 85%) are coming from small, independent, and university presses. Presses that aren’t necessarily in the position to know a lot of book reviewers personally, or capable of throwing a lot of money at a book, etc. And not to put it too bluntly, but a lot of smaller presses are pretty mediocre at publicity, making them really easy to overlook. This ties directly into the second problem: when a book review editor receives a work in translation, it’s probably from an author they’ve never heard of before. Even worse when it’s an author from a country whose literary tradition is unknown to you. If the publisher doesn’t provide a lot of interesting, useful context-building information, it can be hard to decide where an author fits into a particular tradition—not just within his/her country, but in terms of World Literature as a whole. Contrast this with how an American author’s debut is introduced: excerpts appear in various journals well in advance; the author can be taken to various NY book parties and meet reviewers, editors, and the like; the reference points (author X is like author Y + Z – A) are much more obvious and known; and finally, the buzz that builds around these books makes them difficult to ignore. In many (most?) ways the marketing of a translation versus the marketing of a book in English is pretty much the same. But the ways that it differs—reputation recognition, general familiarity with a country’s literary history—makes marketing translations much more challenging. Add in the shrinking print coverage for book reviews, and it obvious why the majority of reviews for international works are appearing in online magazines and blogs. 
 
How does the University of Rochester’s translation studies program and Open Letter Books work together with Three Percent? Is there financial benefit for the website that comes through an affiliation with the university and press?
 
Open Letter and Three Percent are both run by the same people (namely myself, E.J., and Nathan Furl), and we’re part of the U of R’s translation studies programs. Our missions all intersect in various ways: the translation program is about training a new generation of translators and international literature aficionados, Open Letter wants to increase the number of works in translation available to English readers, and Three Percent wants to help raise awareness of international literature and publishing issues. All three work together really well (a very pretty Venn diagram!) to try and do a bit to open up American book culture to more diverse voices. Not so sure there’s a direct financial benefit to Three Percent, but I do know that TP brings some additional attention to the University of Rochester, which can pay off in a number of ways.
  The site's name reflects the oft-cited statistic that three percent of the books published in the United States are works in translation. Since the site's launch in 2007, have you seen changes that suggest the site would need a new name to be accurate? (Two Percent? Four Percent?)
 
Actually seems like it should be much smaller . . . But it depends on how you look at it. Approx. 3% of all works of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. are in translation. At the same time, over the past few years, the overall number of books published in the U.S. has exploded—especially if you include self-published titles. That’s not the case with translations. Or at least they haven’t kept pace. The number of new translations coming out every year has remained pretty level, while publishing stats in general have exploded . . . Nevertheless, I like the name Three Percent. If nothing else, it’s a powerful symbol and points to the fact that there’s a lot more literature out there to explore and find out about. Keyword tags:

This post continues a series on Critical Mass featuring websites dedicated to book reviewing online. Read previous Q&As with The Rumpus, The Millions, The Quarterly Conversation, and Open Letters Monthly.

Since 2007, Three Percent has been reviewing translated books and commenting on works in translation. (The site's name refers to one reported estimate that only three percent of the books published in the United States are translations.) Headquartered at the University of Rochester, the site is connected to the school's translation program as well as its book publisher, Open Letter Books, which publishes one new work each month (readers can subscribe to the series). Chad W. Post, director of Three Percent and Open Letter, is the former associate director at Dalkey Archive Press and cofounder of Reading the World, a collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote international literature. He answered questions from NBCC board member Mark Athitakis about Three Percent via email.

What was the impetus for creating Three Percent? Were you mainly frustrated with the lack of books available in translation or with the lack of coverage those books were getting in review outlets? How much of it was it a natural extension of your work at Dalkey Archive Press and Reading the World?
 
There were a few different reasons for starting Three Percent. I came up with the idea shortly after leaving Dalkey Archive for the University of Rochester to help start a new publishing house doing exclusively literature in translations. Obviously, putting together a press (much less one at a university), takes a lot of time and even after we had figured out a lot of the details for Open Letter, we knew that the first book wouldn’t be out until September 2008 at the earliest. This was in May/June of 2007, and to me and my ADD, this seemed like an eternity. As you allude to in your question, during my time at Dalkey I was involved in a lot of translation-related stuff, including the Reading the World program. I have a great love of international literature, and I also have a great love of talking with book people. My time at Dalkey made me harshly aware of how many translations just slip through the cracks, receiving next to no review attention. Out of these myriad concerns—lack of review attention, desire to communicate with cool book people, my inability to sit still—Three Percent was born. Initially our idea (our senior editor E.J. Van Lanen was instrumental in getting TP going, including designing the site) was to have a daily blog aggregating info about literature in translation from around the world along with weekly book reviews. Something similar to what Michael Orthofer does at Complete Review/Literary Saloon. Over time this has expanded to include the “Translation Database” (so we can figure out exactly what new translations are coming out, from where, and what the real percentage is) and the Best Translated Book Awards.
 
How do you decide which books to review at Three Percent every month?
 
It’s a mixture of my interests and the interests of the reviewers who write for us. I personally enter all the info into the Translation Database, and while doing so, pick out titles that I’d like to at least take a look at. I tend to look for a mix of “big” translations (like the Bolano books, titles coming out from Dalkey or Archipelago, etc.) and more university and small press books. I particularly like when we can review something that I sort of know won’t be getting a lot of attention, but sounds fantastic because of the plot, style, or author’s life. Since our readers are pretty diverse—and international—and include a lot of publishing folks and translators, I feel like it’s part of our mission to seek out these books.  
 
Where do you draw your reviewers from? What skill sets do you look for when it comes to reviewing works in translation that might not be as common among other reviewers?
 
A number of our reviewers are either booksellers or translators. Or really well-read people who have a special interest in international literature. I guess that’s really the special thing about the people who review for Three Percent—they tend to know a lot more about international writers and are able to create a context for these books. 

What do you think drives the relative disinterest among mainstream review outlets to cover works in translation?
 
A few years ago, I was on a panel with Daniel Soar of the London Review of Books that focused on obstacles in publishing and promoting literature in translation. I remember that Daniel was really surprised when in preparing for the panel he looked back over recent issues of the LRB and noticed how few international books they’d reviewed. He had naturally—as had I to be honest—assumed that they were doing a pretty good job. I don’t think that reviewers—or book review editors—are opposed to covering international literature, I just think there are some contextual issues that make it more difficult. For one, the vast majority of translations (about 85%) are coming from small, independent, and university presses. Presses that aren’t necessarily in the position to know a lot of book reviewers personally, or capable of throwing a lot of money at a book, etc. And not to put it too bluntly, but a lot of smaller presses are pretty mediocre at publicity, making them really easy to overlook. This ties directly into the second problem: when a book review editor receives a work in translation, it’s probably from an author they’ve never heard of before. Even worse when it’s an author from a country whose literary tradition is unknown to you. If the publisher doesn’t provide a lot of interesting, useful context-building information, it can be hard to decide where an author fits into a particular tradition—not just within his/her country, but in terms of World Literature as a whole. Contrast this with how an American author’s debut is introduced: excerpts appear in various journals well in advance; the author can be taken to various NY book parties and meet reviewers, editors, and the like; the reference points (author X is like author Y + Z – A) are much more obvious and known; and finally, the buzz that builds around these books makes them difficult to ignore. In many (most?) ways the marketing of a translation versus the marketing of a book in English is pretty much the same. But the ways that it differs—reputation recognition, general familiarity with a country’s literary history—makes marketing translations much more challenging. Add in the shrinking print coverage for book reviews, and it obvious why the majority of reviews for international works are appearing in online magazines and blogs. 
 
How does the University of Rochester’s translation studies program and Open Letter Books work together with Three Percent? Is there financial benefit for the website that comes through an affiliation with the university and press?
 
Open Letter and Three Percent are both run by the same people (namely myself, E.J., and Nathan Furl), and we’re part of the U of R’s translation studies programs. Our missions all intersect in various ways: the translation program is about training a new generation of translators and international literature aficionados, Open Letter wants to increase the number of works in translation available to English readers, and Three Percent wants to help raise awareness of international literature and publishing issues. All three work together really well (a very pretty Venn diagram!) to try and do a bit to open up American book culture to more diverse voices. Not so sure there’s a direct financial benefit to Three Percent, but I do know that TP brings some additional attention to the University of Rochester, which can pay off in a number of ways.
  The site's name reflects the oft-cited statistic that three percent of the books published in the United States are works in translation. Since the site's launch in 2007, have you seen changes that suggest the site would need a new name to be accurate? (Two Percent? Four Percent?)
 
Actually seems like it should be much smaller . . . But it depends on how you look at it. Approx. 3% of all works of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. are in translation. At the same time, over the past few years, the overall number of books published in the U.S. has exploded—especially if you include self-published titles. That’s not the case with translations. Or at least they haven’t kept pace. The number of new translations coming out every year has remained pretty level, while publishing stats in general have exploded . . . Nevertheless, I like the name Three Percent. If nothing else, it’s a powerful symbol and points to the fact that there’s a lot more literature out there to explore and find out about. Keyword tags:

Critical Mass occasionally asks critics to name five books that should be in any reviewer's library. Herewith is Lorin Stein's response.

If you are (or want to be) a critic, then sometimes I think it's good to ask what criticism is for. The first book that made me do that was Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation. "We need an erotics, not a hermeneutics, of art." I was sitting after school in a Swensen's ice cream parlor when I read that. I had to go home and look up the word hermeneutics. But the reviews gave one the gist. This was criticism as seduction. Sontag could make a semi-literate fifteen-year-old want to read Michel Leiris or Samuel Beckett or see a Godard film. She made it all seem both glamorous and accessible--which are things I still feel art should be.

In college, reversing the normal course of things, I came to worship Edmund Wilson, whose first collection, Axel's Castle: The Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930, explained the works of Joyce, Stein, Eliot & Co. by tracing their roots back to the fin de siècle. Explaining gets a bad rap, but Wilson's explanations were also seductions. His books gave me the idea that a critic's first job was to describe complex works in the simplest possible terms. He implied a common reader who really appealed to me. I remember reading Julia Kristeva in college--with Wilson in my head--and thinking, not simply that I missed his prose, but that I missed his reader too.

My other critic-hero in college was D.H. Lawrence. Harold Bloom claims that Lawrence's essay on Whitman, in Studies in Classic American Literature, is the best thing on Whitman ever written. I wouldn't know--it certainly blew my mind. Among other things, it gave me the idea that a critic should write out of anger and love--that love was a problem, perhaps the problem, to be addressed. And that if you have something to say as a critic, you must (in Lawrence's words) say it hot. The sentences were a revelation. Studies is the only book of criticism that I have asked to hear read aloud. I think it is the book I have given most often as a present.

My favorite contemporary book of criticism is Vivian Gornick's collection The End of the Novel of Love. To me that book and Studies make a diptych--both are basically concerned with what Gornick calls "love as metaphor." I read The End of the Novel of Love in my twenties--twice, in the space of a day. Since then I have never written an essay that wasn't, deeply and superficially, indebted to Gornick. For years I tried to model my sentences on hers. My sense of criticism--that it must tell a story, that the story must be true, that the story must unlock a secret in the critic's own inner life--I owe entirely to her example. Whenever a reader points out the similarity of my approach (and my prose) to hers, it is the praise that pleases me most.

David Foster Wallace disowned any debt to his old philosophy teacher Stanley Cavell. To my ear, Cavell's later work is a forerunner to Infinite Jest. It has the sound of a mind questing in plain language, through elaboration and elaboration, to say what it simply knows. Cavell's essay "The Avoidance of Love"--ostensibly a study of embarrassment in King Lear--poses the great paradox of all criticism: that the critic must say what is obvious, what is right there in the text, but must show that every previous critic has ignored it or got it wrong. For that essay, and for his movie criticism, my short shelf would have to include The Cavell Reader, though I hesitate to recommend it above a book like Hugh Kenner's study of British modernism, A Sinking Island; or above Henry Green's memoir, Pack My Bag, which I read continually for encouragement; or above the unmatched poetry criticism of Randall Jarrell; or above William Hazlitt or George Orwell or Richard Poirier or August Kleinzahler's Music I-LXXIV--a book that I keep shoving under people's noses, simply because it beggars description. I also have to mention Dave Hickey's Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, because I read it last week, and can feel it working on me now. But the assignment calls for five recommendations, and those first five are the ones that for better or worse formed my sense of the job.

Lorin Stein is the editor of The Paris Review. His reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and other magazines.

Keyword tags: lorin stein

 

Ron Charles reviews What Is Left the Daughter, by Howard Norman:

An award-winning translator who teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, Norman offers a kind of rough-hewn poetry throughout, starting with that Yoda-like title, "What Is Left the Daughter."

 

Welcome PWxyz, Craig Morgan Teicher’s new Publishers Weekly blog:

What is PWxyz? It's a place to find late-breaking news on the book business, as well as other stuff that falls between the cracks of our other print and online coverage. You'll be hearing from staffers from all of PW's departments--news, reviews, and children's books. Follow us on Twitter: @PWxyz

 

Carmela Cuiraru on Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Had the novel focused only on this imaginative food conceit, it would have been merely clever - but Bender is too good a writer for that. She uses Rose's secret burden as a means of exploring the painful limits of empathy, the perils of loneliness, and Rose's deeply dysfunctional family.

 

Anis Shivani’s interview with Thieves of Manhattan author Adam Langer:

Shivani: As far as I know, you don't teach writing. Thank you for that. And if you do teach, I take it back.

Langer: You are oh so welcome. I always loved writing, so I never wanted to take a class in it and ruin the magic of it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, universities would rather not hire people to teach subjects they never really studied. If you want to present yourself as a great writing teacher, you have to have the talents of a great professional con artist, and I'm still learning that craft.

 

Julia M. Klein, in Obit Magazine, on Robert K. Elder's Last Words of the Executed: 

There is not just humor, but also humanity stripped down to its essence in Robert K. Elder’s powerful new compendium, Last Words of the Executed (University of Chicago Press). Those who are about to die salute life. They send love to friends and family, express fervent faith in an afterlife, request absolution from those they have injured, and sometimes insist on their innocence. (Some may even be telling the truth.)

 

An appreciation of Harvey Pekar by David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times:

Here’s a phrase you don’t often hear in regard to Harvey Pekar: role model. And yet, it seems an apt description of the iconoclastic comics genius, who was found dead early Monday at age 70 in his Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home. Think about it — a longtime VA hospital file clerk with no ability to draw, Pekar essentially reinvented himself, in his 30s, as the creator of "American Splendor," perhaps the greatest of all the underground comics. It is difficult to imagine the subsequent history of the form without its influence.

Keyword tags:

This summer I’m diving back into poetry. Contemporary poetry. A book a day. Glorious, atopical immersion, without worry, territorialism, or bondage to task. Last week I read Mina Pam Dick’s Delinquent (Futurepoem), Karen Weiser’s To Light Out (Ugly Duckling Presse), Rebecca Wolff’s Manderley (U. of Illinois), Rebecca Woolf’s Figment (Norton), C. G. Giscombe’s Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive), Richard Sieburth’s translation of Guillevic’s Geometries (Ugly Duckling Presse), Kostas Anagnopoulos's Moving Blanket (Ugly Duckling Presse). So far, for next week I have lined up Marcella Durand’s Area (Belladonna Books), Lisa Robertson’s The Men (Book Thug), Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure (Coach House Books), Mark Bibbins’s The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon), and Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat & Other Poems (Fence Books). If I take a detour into prose this summer, I’d love to read Herta Müller’s The Passport (Serpent’s Tail, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers), Jakov Lind’s Ergo (Open Letter, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim), Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia (Grove, translated from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt), Marguerite Duras’s Yann Andréa Steiner (Archipelago, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome 1950-1966 (Handsel Books, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss), and The Diaries of Paul Klee (U. of California Press, translated from the Swiss German by Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary, and Max Knight). I’m partial to certain independent presses and will read almost anything they publish: Ugly Duckling, Fence Books, Archipelago, Dalkey Archive, Futurepoem. And others.

 

 

Wayne Koestenbaum was a finalist for the 1993 NBCC Award for Criticism for The Queen’s Throat, a study of opera. He has also published poetry, fiction, and the libretto to the opera Jackie O. Among his books are Bestselling Jewish Porn Films, a collection of poetry, and Hotel Theory. He lives in New York and teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. (Photo: Heike Steinweg)

Keyword tags: wayne koestenbaum

Critical Mass occasionally asks critics to name five books that should be in any reviewer's library. Herewith is Lorin Stein's response.

If you are (or want to be) a critic, then sometimes I think it's good to ask what criticism is for. The first book that made me do that was Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation. "We need an erotics, not a hermeneutics, of art." I was sitting after school in a Swensen's ice cream parlor when I read that. I had to go home and look up the word hermeneutics. But the reviews gave one the gist. This was criticism as seduction. Sontag could make a semi-literate fifteen-year-old want to read Michel Leiris or Samuel Beckett or see a Godard film. She made it all seem both glamorous and accessible--which are things I still feel art should be.

In college, reversing the normal course of things, I came to worship Edmund Wilson, whose first collection, Axel's Castle: The Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930, explained the works of Joyce, Stein, Eliot & Co. by tracing their roots back to the fin de siècle. Explaining gets a bad rap, but Wilson's explanations were also seductions. His books gave me the idea that a critic's first job was to describe complex works in the simplest possible terms. He implied a common reader who really appealed to me. I remember reading Julia Kristeva in college--with Wilson in my head--and thinking, not simply that I missed his prose, but that I missed his reader too.

My other critic-hero in college was D.H. Lawrence. Harold Bloom claims that Lawrence's essay on Whitman, in Studies in Classic American Literature, is the best thing on Whitman ever written. I wouldn't know--it certainly blew my mind. Among other things, it gave me the idea that a critic should write out of anger and love--that love was a problem, perhaps the problem, to be addressed. And that if you have something to say as a critic, you must (in Lawrence's words) say it hot. The sentences were a revelation. Studies is the only book of criticism that I have asked to hear read aloud. I think it is the book I have given most often as a present.

My favorite contemporary book of criticism is Vivian Gornick's collection The End of the Novel of Love. To me that book and Studies make a diptych--both are basically concerned with what Gornick calls "love as metaphor." I read The End of the Novel of Love in my twenties--twice, in the space of a day. Since then I have never written an essay that wasn't, deeply and superficially, indebted to Gornick. For years I tried to model my sentences on hers. My sense of criticism--that it must tell a story, that the story must be true, that the story must unlock a secret in the critic's own inner life--I owe entirely to her example. Whenever a reader points out the similarity of my approach (and my prose) to hers, it is the praise that pleases me most.

David Foster Wallace disowned any debt to his old philosophy teacher Stanley Cavell. To my ear, Cavell's later work is a forerunner to Infinite Jest. It has the sound of a mind questing in plain language, through elaboration and elaboration, to say what it simply knows. Cavell's essay "The Avoidance of Love"--ostensibly a study of embarrassment in King Lear--poses the great paradox of all criticism: that the critic must say what is obvious, what is right there in the text, but must show that every previous critic has ignored it or got it wrong. For that essay, and for his movie criticism, my short shelf would have to include The Cavell Reader, though I hesitate to recommend it above a book like Hugh Kenner's study of British modernism, A Sinking Island; or above Henry Green's memoir, Pack My Bag, which I read continually for encouragement; or above the unmatched poetry criticism of Randall Jarrell; or above William Hazlitt or George Orwell or Richard Poirier or August Kleinzahler's Music I-LXXIV--a book that I keep shoving under people's noses, simply because it beggars description. I also have to mention Dave Hickey's Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, because I read it last week, and can feel it working on me now. But the assignment calls for five recommendations, and those first five are the ones that for better or worse formed my sense of the job.

Lorin Stein is the editor of The Paris Review. His reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and other magazines.

Keyword tags: lorin stein