I went to my favorite local bookstore today to pick up my daughter’s sixth-grade required reading list and to offload some books I’ll never read again. I have far too many tasteful trade paperbacks that I don’t need. I try to bring three or four in on each trip and only come out with one… Continue reading Stanley Elkin/Flann O’Brien (Book acquired and book not acquired, 23 May 2018)
[Ed. note: I finished Stanley Elkin’s 1971 novel The Dick Gibson Show a few days ago. I read The Dick Gibson Show immediately after finishing Elkin’s 1976 novel The Franchiser. I want to write something about these novels, which seem of a piece to me, but I also wanted to get a bit more context first, and the most basic… Continue reading Stanley Elkin reviews Stanley Elkin’s novel The Dick Gibson Show (kinda sorta)
He could not depend upon his listeners; he had no notion of them. They were as faceless to him as he to them. (They didn’t even have a voice.) His panels, his Special Guests were more real. As for his listeners, he guessed they were insomniacs, cabbies, enlisted men signed out on leave at midnight… Continue reading Passionate extremists (From Stanley Elkin’s novel The Dick Gibson Show)
The report has come back. It’s official. HIC SUNT DODOS! The dodo is an extinct species of ungainly, flightless bird of the genus Raphus or Didus. Its incubation ground and later its world was the island of Mauritius. It was closely related in habit and aspect to a smaller bird, the solitaire, also extinct but… Continue reading HIC SUNT DODOS! (From Stanley Elkin’s novel The Dick Gibson Show)
They drove up to the Broadmoor, a pink Monaco castle at the foot of the Rockies, and he showed her the hotel in a proprietary way, taking her through the nifty Regency public rooms with their beautiful sofas, the striped, silken upholstery like tasteful flags. He showed her huge tiaras of chandelier, soft plush carpets.… Continue reading Men will the laws of nature (From Stanley Elkin’s novel The Franchiser)
“How crowded is the universe,” his godfather said and moved the plasma arm vaguely. “How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap. Consider, Ben. You could have been a pencil or the metal band that holds the eraser to the wood, the wire of lead that runs through it. The black N in ‘Number… Continue reading How crowded is the universe (Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser)
From Washington University’s marvelous Modern Literature Collection YouTube channel.
I swung by my favorite used bookstore this afternoon; it’s right near the grocery store and I needed to pick up some mint and some ricotta. I was hoping to pick up Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend at the bookstore. I started the audiobook of My Brilliant Friend today, after finishing the audiobook of Adrian Jones Pearson’s… Continue reading Books acquired, almost for their covers alone, 4.25.2016 (Elkin, Fine, Michaux)
I was thrilled to find a somewhat tattered copy of Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex, after trolling the [huge, unorganized] “HA” section of my favorite used bookstore. Years ago, I found like seven of Hannah’s books used there and picked up only one. I devoured it, returned, the rest were gone. Regrets, regrets. I will review this… Continue reading Barry Hannah/Stanley Elkin (Books Acquired, 5.29.2013)
The papers of Gass seemed immaculate, each box like a freshly dug pool. By comparison, the papers of Whitman and Woolf and David Foster Wallace are filled with scraps and sheets that bear the odor from yesterday’s hands. I had already done my due diligence with The Reader, weeks of close reading and margin scribbling through… Continue reading The papers of Gass seemed immaculate, each box like a freshly dug pool
RIP William H. Gass, 1924-2017 I have now deleted three iterations of this “RIP William H. Gass” blog post. (If this iteration survives I will not edit it (this is the only way it will survive)). Each of these earlier drafts did not start with the grammatical subject “I” (here referring to me, Ed Turner, the… Continue reading RIP William H. Gass
The Telling, Ursula K. Le Guin Four Ways to Forgiveness, Ursula K. Le Guin J R, William Gaddis* The Inheritors, William Golding American Candide, Mahendra Singh Crossing the Sea with Syrians on the Exodus to Europe, William Bauer Collected Stories, William Faulkner A Temple of Texts, William H. Gass Cow Country, Adrian Jones Pearson Ancillary… Continue reading A (probably incomplete) list of books I read in 2016
Daniel Green’s The Reading Experience was one of the first sites I started reading regularly when I first started blogging about literature on Biblioklept. If you regularly read literary criticism online, it’s likely you’ve read some of Green’s reviews in publications like The Kenyon Review, 3:AM, Full Stop, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Full Stop, and more. Green’s got a… Continue reading An interview with literary critic Daniel Green about his new book, Beyond the Blurb
When I first heard about the concept for Scott Esposito’s new book The Missing Books, I thought, Damn. I wish I had thought of that. Then I read it and thought, Damn, I wish I had written that. The Missing Books is an ongoing e-book project, “a curated directory of books that do not exist, but should.” The… Continue reading An interview with Scott Esposito, author of The Missing Books
I read a lot of great books this year but had a hard time writing full reviews for all of them. These are some of the ones I liked the most. Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard I finished Woodcutters just the other night, reading most of it in three sittings. (Actually, I was lying down. And it was… Continue reading Sixteen books I wish I’d written more about in 2016
This blog is ten years old today. So here are ten sets of ten somethings. Just a picture of ten random books, which in no way should be thought of as a real list, okay?: Ten great books I read in 2016: JR, William Gaddis–a reread that topped the list of nine books that I… Continue reading Biblioklept is ten years old today, so ten sets of ten somethings
I read a lot of great books over the past few months and failed to write proper reviews for some of them, including two by Stanley Elkin—The Franchiser and The Dick Gibson Show—a double feature of two novellas by W.D. Clarke called White Mythology, and Marketa Lazarova by Vladislav Vančura. But I did riff on other books. One of the best books… Continue reading Reviews, riffs, etc. of June-July, 2016 (and an unrelated pig)
