I’m a big fan of Drew Lerman’s work, and I’m always excited when he puts together a new collection. His latest is Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations, collecting his recent strips. I would describe these strips as functioning in the mode of pseudoautiobiographical postmodern literary interrogation, only that makes them sound pretentious, which they aren’t. They are very funny and very niche, and I often feel like I am Lerman’s ideal reader. This is my niche.
Each one-page strip features (a version of) Lerman encountering (and often trailing) a writer (DeLillo, obv., but also Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen, Gordon Lish, William T. Vollmann…); the conversations are often very one-sided and allow Lerman to interrogate his subject on the kind of minutiae that often overtakes our ability to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, when it comes to art. In one of my favorite bits, for example, Lerman critiques the implementation of (“middle school book report-ass”) Courier New Unjustified as the font for DeLillo’s novel The Silence. I could go on but I should save it for a proper review.
Conversations with Don DeLillo also features a great negative blurb by a certain grouchy “Myron Circle”:
And maybe this is corny of me, but I love that Lerman used Chris Ware stamps to mail me Conversations with Don DeLillo. (Chris Ware shows up in Conversations, btw — he tries to give Lerman a bunch of his books and tell Lerman how much he loves Snake Creek
More thoughts to come.
Biblioklept 