It is a relief to turn to the honest American book about the whale. A captain wants to kill it because the last time he tried to do that it bit off his leg while escaping. He embarks with a cosmopolitan crew who don’t like home life and prefer this way of earning money. They… Continue reading Moby-Dick (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark)
The more he worked the more the furious figure of God kept popping in and having to be removed: God driving out Adam and Eve for learning to tell right from wrong, God preferring meat to vegetables and making the first planter hate the first herdsman, God wiping the slate of the world clean with… Continue reading Complaint to God (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark)
It is a relief to turn to the honest American book about the whale. A captain wants to kill it because the last time he tried to do that it bit off his leg while escaping. He embarks with a cosmopolitan crew who don’t like home life and prefer this way of earning money. They… Continue reading Moby-Dick (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark)
The more he worked the more the furious figure of God kept popping in and having to be removed: God driving out Adam and Eve for learning to tell right from wrong, God preferring meat to vegetables and making the first planter hate the first herdsman, God wiping the slate of the world clean with… Continue reading Complaint to God (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark)
“There was once a building boom,” said Thaw, growing excited, “In north Italy. The local governments and bankers of three or four towns, towns the size of Paisley, put so much wealth and thought into decorating public buildings that half Europe’s greatest painters were bred there in a single century. These bosses weren’t unselfish men,… Continue reading Our best paintings look like screams of pain (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark)
My beloved bookstore reopened this Monday. This past Wednesday, I donned my finest mask, got into the car for the first time in a while, and drove the 1.1 miles to my beloved bookstore, which reopened this Monday. I had done curbside pickup on a few books for my kids sometime early in April, but… Continue reading Melville/Ishiguro (Books acquired, 13 May 2020)
RIP Alasdair Gray, 1934-2019 The Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray died today, one day after his 85th birthday. Gray’s first novel, 1981’s Lanark, is one of the strangest and most memorable novels I’ve ever read. Part dystopian fantasy, part realist autofiction, part Kafkaesque anti-quest, and part Künstlerroman, Lanark deconstructs the traditional novel, braiding multiple narratives into… Continue reading RIP Alasdair Gray
A story can always end happily by stopping at a cheerful moment. Of course in nature the only end is death, but death hardly ever happens when people are at their best. That is why we like tragedies. They show men ending energetically with their wits about them and deserving to do it. From Alasdair… Continue reading Why we like tragedies (Alasdair Gray)
On Friday, I went to my trusty local used bookstore to look, once again, for a copy of Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower. They had four new copies, all of Grand Central Publishing’s 2000 edition, the cover of which is frankly awful. I know I shouldn’t be so shallow, but…I’ll end up checking out the… Continue reading Books acquired (and not acquired) 8 and 15 March 2019
Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s 1991 novella Quiet Creature on the Corner is new in English translation (by Adam Morris) from Two Lines Press. The book is probably best read without any kind of foregrounding or forewarning. Forewarning (and enthusiastic endorsement): Quiet Creature on the Corner is a nightmarish, abject, kinetic, surreal, picaresque read, a mysterious prose-poem that resists allegorical interpretation. […]
… Continue reading A review of João Gilberto Noll’s surreal novella Quiet Creature on the Corner
After years of false starts, I finally read Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard this August. Then I read it again, immediately. (It’s one of only two novels I can recall rereading right away—the other two were Blood Meridian and Gravity’s Rainbow). The Leopard tells the story of Prince Fabrizio of Sicily, who witnesses the end of his… Continue reading Three Books (or, My three favorite reading experiences in 2016)
Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s 1991 novella Quiet Creature on the Corner is new in English translation (by Adam Morris) from Two Lines Press. The book is probably best read without any kind of foregrounding or forewarning. Forewarning (and enthusiastic endorsement): Quiet Creature on the Corner is a nightmarish, abject, kinetic, surreal, picaresque read, a mysterious prose-poem that resists allegorical interpretation.… Continue reading A review of João Gilberto Noll’s surreal novella Quiet Creature on the Corner
In today’s mail I found a small package from Two Lines Press containing João Gilberto Noll’s 1991 novella Quiet Creature on the Corner, freshly translated into English from Portuguese by Adam Morris. I started into the Noll. Each sentence made me want to read the next sentence. What is it about? you ask, perhaps. Well. I’m not sure. Let’s… Continue reading A quick riff on the first 30 pages of Quiet Creature on the Corner, João Gilberto Noll’s nightmare novella (Book acquired, 5.03.2016)
Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte. English translation by Cesare Foligno. 2005 trade paperback by NYRB. Cover painting is Odd Nerdrum’s The Dentures; cover design by Katy Homans. Bought this a while ago and have been meaning to take a serious crack at it for some time now. 1982 Janine by Alasdair Gray. 1985 trade paperback by Penguin. No designer… Continue reading Three Books
From top to bottom: Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed Last summer, I read Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark and never mustered a review (Florida heat; Fourth of July fireworks; booze; other excuses). I’ve thought about Lanark all the time though. I’m afraid Mumbo Jumbo is gonna fall in the same slot as Lanark—too much to handle in one read. I need to go… Continue reading Reading/Have Read/Should Write About
The Star is one of several pieces of art by Alasdair Gray that accompany Rodge Glass’s review of the Scottish novelist’s collection of non-fiction pieces, Of Me & Others. The first paragraph of Glass’s piece: At the time I finished my biography of the polymath Alasdair Gray, in 2008, my subject was at a curious juncture. Though… Continue reading The Star — Alasdair Gray
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon (incomplete) The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy (abandoned) Life A User’s Manual, Georges Perec (abandoned with intentions to return) An Armful of Warm Girl, W.M. Spackman Dockwood, Jon McNaught The Laughing Monsters, Denis Johnson The Trip to Echo Spring , Olivia Laing (incomplete) An… Continue reading List with No Name #50
Biblioklept 