I spent a relaxing hour and a half browsing my favorite local used bookstore this afternoon. I ended up finding a copy of Helen DeWitt’s debut novel The Last Samurai, which all kindsa smart folks have been telling me to read for years. I didn’t like her follow-up Lightning Rods, and stalled out on her collection Some Trick earlier this year—but we’ll see.
William Goldman died today. I’ve always thought of him primarily as a screenwriter, and I think much of his screenwriting work is pretty great, The Princess Bride in particular (the one Goldman novel we own is The Princess Bride, currently in my daughter’s possession). I couldn’t help but look over some of his books today.
…which is how I ended up picking up William Golding’s Pincher Martin. (Golding, not Goldman). I read his 1955 novel The Inheritors a few years ago and I think when I was talking about it somewhere (maybe online), someone recommended Pincher Martin—and I couldn’t pass up this Penguin edition with cover art by Paul Hogarth.
I also thumbed through a copy of Robert Scholes’s Fabulation and Metafiction (1980), reading a big chunk of the chapter called “The Nature of Experimental Fiction.” The chapter begins with four illustrating quotations from four masters of metafiction:
Biblioklept 