Marshall Brooks’s recent collection of memoir-essays Paperback Island explores the ways that friendship and place influence what we read, how we read, and how we make—and keep—books. Marshall began his career in publishing in 1971, reading manuscripts for Harry Smith at his legendary publishing house The Smith. In 1979 he created Arts End Press. Subtitled Street Bibliography Essays, Marshall’s latest… Continue reading Marshall Brooks Talks to Biblioklept About Microlibraries, Indie Publishing, and His New Book, Paperback Island →
There’s something gently elegiac about Marshall Brooks’s Paperback Island, which collects over a dozen essays on reading. While Brooks’s essays on books, libraries, publishers, and the friendships that hold all of them together are never dour, they nevertheless evoke a world now shifting into the realm of memory alone. It’s fitting then that the starting… Continue reading I Review Paperback Island, Marshall Brooks’s Love Letter to Books and the People Who Make Them →
Marshall Brook’s memoir-in-essays, Paperback Island arrived at Biblioklept World Headquarters today. Brooks’s book snagged me into an hour of reading I hadn’t planned on doing, even from the preface (I usually skim or skip prefaces, but Brooks’s hooked me—he opens at Tuli Kupferberg’s funeral and then talks about reading a book that required him to actually stay… Continue reading Paperback Island (Lovely and Vibrant Book Acquired, 4.05.2013) →
BOOK REVIEWS: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z FILM REVIEWS TELEVISION REVIEWS MISCELLANY Book reviews Adrian, Chris A Better Angel — Chris Adrian Gob’s Grief — Chris Adrian The Children’s Hospital — Chris Adrian Alexander, Patrick Marcel… Continue reading Reviews →
Reviews, essays, riffs, etc. Most recent first. Updates sporadic at best.
My James M. Cain discovery tour continued with Double Indemnity, which I loved loved loved. The novel’s terse, mean, a bit queasy, and zippy as hell. Over the July 4th weekend my uncle and I made plans to watch Billy Wilder’s 1944 film adaptation, but maybe heat and alcohol got in the way. I’ll get to… Continue reading Blog about some recent reading (Bolaño/Cain/Calvino/Dara/Johnson) →
So my son finished Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Tuesday night, giving me a nice excuse to swing by the used bookstore on Wednesday to pick up the next two entries in the series, The Restaurant at the End of The Universe and Life, the Universe and Everything. I managed to find the same… Continue reading Conrad/Hughes (Books acquired, 2 Aug. 2020) →
Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Fat trade paperback by Vintage; most recent date indicates 1975 but that can’t be right. No designer credited. You know Poe. Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston. 1983 trade paperback edition from Turtle Island. Neither designer nor photographer are credited. A wonderful and weird trip to Jamaica… Continue reading Three Books →
Despite having a pretty large TBR stack, I killed this afternoon’s spare hour at my favorite used bookstore. This particular bookstore is a maze of used books, labyrinthine walls of books, with ever-mutating shelves growing from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. I confess I don’t always stoop low—I get old, I… Continue reading Blog about some books acquired, 17 July 2019 (and some Poe and Whitman illustrations) →
This morning my dean told me that I needed to pack up my office over the summer as the building I’m in will be undergoing a renovation. Even though I knew this was coming, the prospect hit me as a series of big anxiety waves. My walls are covered with masks, art, pictures. I have… Continue reading Blog about giving books away and buying books for a friend and acquiring some books for myself →
Set millennia in the future, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 dystopian novel We tells the story of a man whose sense of self shatters when he realizes he can no longer conform to the ideology of his totalitarian government. Zamyatin’s novel is a zany, prescient, poetic tale about resisting the forces of tyranny, conformity, and brute, unimaginative groupthink.… Continue reading A review of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s prescient dystopian novel We →
I went to the book store this afternoon to pick up a copy of the latest graphic novel in by Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series for my kids, and of course I browsed a while. Looking for a copy of Anne Carson’s Plainwater, I ended up finding Angela Carter’s 1972 novel Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. It’s a British edition, 1985,… Continue reading Blog about some books and some book covers and acquiring some books and not acquiring some books →
Four review copies in yesterday’s mail (solicited and unsolicited). I get behind on these books acquired posts, so I’ll lump the books in all at once and quickly. First and foremost: Lucia Berlin’s collection A Manual for Cleaning Women is new in trade paperback from Picador. The book got a ton of buzz last year when… Continue reading Books acquired, 7.13.2016 →
I wanted to read Mat Johnson’s novel Pym when it came out last year, so I was pleased when Random House sent me a copy of the forthcoming trade paperback. Random House’s blurb: Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes has just made a startling discovery: the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that… Continue reading Pym (Book Acquired, 8.16.2012) →
A nice stack from the good folks at Picador this month, including two new entries in their ongoing Nadine Gordimer reissues. I like the design on the series: There’s also a reissue of Denis Johnson’s 1991 novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, which I haven’t read, but will read soon, because Johnson is just one of… Continue reading Books Acquired, 6.25.2012—Or, Here’s What’s New from Picador This Month →
The second part of an interview with the editors of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes Derek Pyle Discusses Waywords and Meansigns, an Unabridged Musical Adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake An Interview with Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes, Editors of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion (Part I) “The… Continue reading Interviews →
Seventeen-year-old Mari, the narrator and subject of Yoko Ogawa’s new novel Hotel Iris, is something of a Cinderella figure. Her dad dies a violent death when she is only eight years old and her grandparents soon pass on as well, leaving her in the sole custody of her money-grubbing mother who works poor Mari like… Continue reading Hotel Iris — Yoko Ogawa →
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