The Critical Sphere

Daniel Pritchard has created a new online book review, The Critical Flame. The current issue contains "only" three reviews, but I think such an approach, potentially bringing more attention to fewer reviews, makes good sense.

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At Torque Control, Niall Harrison reviews Tokyo Cancelled, by Rana Dasgupta:

The most obvious comparison to draw is probably with David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) – another sparklingly multifaceted debut collection, with just enough connective tissue to be disguised as a novel; another book that sets itself a globe-encapsulating mandate, carried through with clarity and readability – with the difference that Rana Dasgupta’s book is rather more full-throated in its use of the fantastic.

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The newest issue of Common-Place is a special issue called "Who Reads an Early American Book?". The essays included take, of course, an historical approach to early American literature, an approach to which I am not usually well-disposed, but most of the essays are worth reading, nevertheless, especially the essay on Charles Brockden Brown and the one on Washington Irving.

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Poet Josh Corey describes his new fiction project:

I want something supple enough to include characters and events and essayistic digressions, shards and skeins of beautiful language, autobiography and the totally made-up, surrealism and satire and realism. The shape it all eventually assumes will be called a novel because "novel" seems to be the most capacious literary genre form available. But I will still be trying to maintain, as I try to do in my poems, some balance between my natural preoccupation with language and my life in what we call the world.

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At Wisdom of the West, Jim H offers a four-part discussion of William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic. The money quote:

William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic is told from a consistent, though unobvious and, to me, unusual, and objective—dare I say realistic—point of view: that of the house with the quirky architectural style which stages all the book's direct action and dialogue. This is not a necessary conclusion to an understanding of the book, but it certainly provides a satisfactory description of the POV. As the central character, Elizabeth Booth, says in the passage quoted in the previous post: "it's a hard house to hide in." Everyone is seen from the outside. No one is presented sympathetically, though our sensibilities are naturally drawn to Elizabeth Booth by virtue of her time on stage. She is in nearly every scene.

Comments

[becca]

I've already commented on each of his Gaddis posts - and his dissection of Nabokov's narrative voice in Pnin, so I figured I'd come over here and thank you for directing me to Jim H's blog. GREAT stuff over there.