Tag: Books Acquired

Riff on some Friends of the Library Sale acquisitions

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I ducked out of work maybe a little bit early on Friday and filled a brown paper bag with books at a Friends of the Library sale.

I picked up some hardback first editions of books I already own in cheaper formats–Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters, P.D. James’s The Children of Men, and Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea. I also got hardcover editions of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, Amy Hempel’s Sing to It, Atticus Lish’s The War for Gloria, and Eugenio Corti’s The Red Horse.

I also grabbed some duplicates or alternate paperback editions of books I already own, including an academically-oriented edition of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and William Faulkner’s Light in August. I gave the Calvino to my son; the Stein is for a colleague. I’ll give Light in August to a student. (I got the same edition of the Faulkner at the last Friends of the Library sale I went to; my son claimed it.) I’ll also probably offer the Bourdain memoir to a student. I’m pretty sure we have a copy of Kitchen Confidential somewhere around the house. I couldn’t pass up on the cheap mass-market copy of Melville’s White Jacket. I mean, just look at this cover—dude’s wearing a white jacket—

The book also bears a stamp claiming it originated (in a sense) at the old Melville Manse, Arrowhead:

I also couldn’t resist letting a paperback copy of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport take up a lot of real estate in my paper grocery bag. The hype has died down enough for me to perhaps eventually sink into it. The edition of Alan & John Lomax’s American Ballads & Folk Songs is kinda beat up, but it’s got a lovely cover:

I was also attracted to this strange edition of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. It’s a 1987 hardback from the Soviet house Raduga Publishers, featuring a full-color portrait of Gogol and blue (?) page headings. The translation is by Christopher English and the book was printed in the U.S.S.R.—I’m not really sure who the intended audience was.

Albert Cullum’s The Geranium in the Window Sill Just Died But Teacher You Went Right On was another oddity I came across. Ostensibly a children’s book, The Geranium ultimately seems aimed at teachers. It features illustrations on every other page, each one by a different artist; many are remarkable, like this one by Stanley Mack–

There were a few titles, not pictured in the image at the top of this post, that I grabbed to cram into my bag simply because I had extra room at the end. I can usually offset the ten dollar bag fee by identifying a handful of pristine trade paperbacks that my local used bookstore will take for trade credit. So maybe I’m not, like, really offsetting the ten dollar fee so much as redirecting it toward obtaining more books.

There were plenty of titles at this particular sale that I would’ve crammed into the bag maybe ten or fifteen years ago—lots of books by Haruki Marukami, who has never been my guy, Jonathan Lethem (who I once really loved), Michael Chabon, Irvine Welsh, and even Chuck Palahniuk (there was a time when I was younger and had a broader range of friends that I could’ve given Palahniuk titles away easily). But I ended up imagining some younger person showing up to the sale, maybe today, Saturday, filling up a bag with titles that promised something beyond the YA formula stuff that makes up their current literary diet.

And if I imagined a younger person growing their library, I also imagined some of the older people whose collections had clearly ended up at the sale. Beyond the obvious airport thrillers and glut of titles by fiction factory Authors™, there were sets of strange, off-brand looking fantasy series in hardback, a seemingly-full run of Agatha Christie mysteries (also in hardback), Westerns no one will read again. Other people’s oddities ended up here; their children had no place for them, having subscribed to their own burdensome addictions.

I’ll have to give away all these books I’ve acquired at some point. But there’s joy in that too.

 

Mid-August riff; some books acquired, etc.

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The last two weeks flew by. My kids went back to school this week; they are attending the same school for the first time since elementary school, high school,my own dear mother, that school, and I am relieved, if only temporarily from driving duties. We are making pizzas in an hour or two to celebrate the first Friday of their school year (we make pizzas every Friday as a nifty fridge clearing activity, but let’s not ruin the sparkle). My own semester starts the week after next and I realize that I need to do something more with my summers now that my children are so much older than they were when they were little children, when I was with them all summer, or if I wasn’t exactly right there with them I was hovering in the background.

I am on track to read fewer novels, or books, or whatever, than I read in July of this year. I finished Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions and liked it very much, or liked the experience or feeling of reading it, whatever that means, and I owe it a proper review. In July I read Katherine Dunn’s debut novel Attic and loved it. I couldn’t find her 1971 follow-up Truck in any of the used bookstores I frequent, so I ended up listening to it on audiobook. Maybe it was the narrator’s narration but I found it disappointing, but I still appreciate its grime and its abjection and its picaresque energy. I also checked out some Stephen Dixon e-books from my library; I read a handful of fucked up stories (a piece called “The Intruder” was especially weird) before digging into his 1988 novel Garbage. I read the first half of Garbage last night and I don’t even know how to describe it—it’s sort of like wandering upon some forgotten gritty 1970s American exploitation film made by an insane but focused auteur. But it’s also very normal in a way I will not explain. It’s uncanny.

I purged about thirty paperbacks last week at my local used bookstore and ordered a copy of the latest Antoine Volodine novel, Gina M. Stamm’s translation of Mevlido’s Dreams. A recent reading of Volodine’s Radiant Terminus left me hungry for more of that sweet gross post-exotic flavor. I went to pick up the Volodine today and ended up with two hardbacks. I admit that the blurb on the back of Thomas Sullivan’s 1989 novel Born Burning sold me; it compared his previous novel to William Gaddis, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut. I also snapped up a first-edition hardback 1985 edition of William S. Burroughs’s novel Queer, which I fear was quite underpriced, although I don’t fear that too much. (All my sweet purged paperback credit is gone!)

I am ready for the summer to end.

Biblioklept Does Atlanta (Books acquired, some time last week)

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Last week, the wife and I drove five hours north to Atlanta, Georgia where we stayed five days in the Cabbagetown neighborhood. Our ostensible purpose was an anniversary trip focused around a Slowdive concert last Friday, but I think we really went to just hang out and eat and drink away from our kids for a few nights. It was famous times.

The Slowdive concert itself was excellent, despite the best efforts of the awful opening band, a dubious and I must assume ironic project called Drab Majesty, and the sound system at the The Eastern. The venue seemed ill-equipped to handle the tonality of either band. I don’t want to sound like a very old man but it was Too Fucking Loud. Opener Drab Majesty, whose sound came from a single guitar, a single synth, and, I’m guessing, a few loop pedals, seemed to have plugged directly into the PA system. It was the absolute worst sound I’ve ever heard. (Earlier that day, driving in awful Atlanta traffic, we listened to a seventeen-minute Merzbow song on the alternate band of Georgia Tech’s WREK radio station; although Merzbow is “noise” music, that song had more musicality, tonality, and depth of rhythm than Drab Majesty.)

Slowdive was excellent live–much more of a rock sound than I’d expected; I’ve really enjoyed their two newer records, particularly the self-titled one from a few years back, but the songs from Souvlaki sounded particularly fierce live. The setlist was great, and they closed with a cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair” that might have gone on for 10 or 12 minutes; it was hypnotic. Here is the single picture I took during the show:

But books—

Without children about and with my wife having to work half days from the rented garage apartment, I had enough time to indulge going to pretty much any bookstore I wanted to in Atlanta. I ended up sticking mostly to East Atlanta where we were staying though.

I had been to A Capella Books a few years ago and had somehow entirely missed their used book annex, which had some really great stuff in it, including a first edition of Blood Meridian and Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men. I ended up chatting with the owner Frank for a bit; a very nice guy, he showed me his personal collection of Vintage Contemporaries and we talked in general about our shared sickness of book collecting. I left with Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s new novel American Abductions and a first-edition hardback of McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. This second purchase seems to have initiated the trip’s theme of buying editions of books I already own—but now I have all three Knopf editions of The Border Trilogy, so everyone can sleep easier.

I stopped by Criminal Records in Little Five Points and didn’t pick anything up, although I’m happy to see that CDs have made such a comeback. (I almost certainly would have bought the new Gastr del Sol box set if it was out yet.) I then made my way to Bibliotech Books in Candler Park. The proprietor assured me that he was in the process of reorganizing, but the store was frankly a mess. One bookcase was organized by the color of the book’s spines. The inventory seemed to be someone’s childhood and adolescent books.

I headed to Virginia Highland Books, a perfectly-respectable book shop in the perfectly-respectable Virginia Highland neighborhood. The perfectly-respectable inventory was not particularly interesting, although I imagine it perfectly suits the perfectly-respectable clientele. On the way to Virginia Highland Books, at a red light, I found myself stopped next to something called Videodrome, so of course I pulled in. I got dizzy in Videodrome a DVD-rental shop stuffed with thousands and thousands of cult films, non-English language films, art films, concert films…amazing stuff. The only thing I could compare it to were some of the rental shops I’d gone to decades ago when I lived in Tokyo. I mean, this place had the Cannibal Ferox soundtrack on vinyl. I spoke to the proprietor for a while. He gave me a sticker. I saw him at the Slowdive show the next night but left him alone.

My last bookshop visit that day was to Bookish, a small indie spot specializing in books by women. I liked the store but was honestly too tired to look around much after two tallboys at a PBR-themed bar in Virginia Highland.

Over the next few days, I visited three more bookshops, all more or less by chance. We went to Decatur, simply to check it out, and parked in Decatur Square right in front of Little Shop of Stories. Framed original artwork by visiting authors adorns the walls of this children’s bookshop, and there’s a life-sized reproduction of the room from Margaret Wise Brown’s classic Good Night Moon that one can hang out in. I felt a little melancholy that our children have outgrown children’s books.

On the way back to Atlanta, we swung by Eagle Eye Books, a Decatur spot specializing in used books (with a large collection of vintage sci-fi hardbacks in a back room). They have several carts of dollar books that are supposedly accessible 24/7—there are lock boxes to slide your dollars into. I ended up picking up different editions of two books I already own: Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in hardback and the 1985 Elisabeth Sifton Books/Penguin Books printing of William Gaddis’s J R. The J R is basically falling apart and is crammed with annotations; I love it. I gave three crumpled dollars over for these two books and then drove back to our garage apartment so we could walk to tacos and then the concert.

The mid-morning after the Slowdive concert we hung out for a while at the Virginia Highland Porchfest. We parked at the Ponce City Market to walk to Porchfest and on the way back stopped at Posman Books. I’d been there before, and while it’s basically a gift shop, its literature section is surprisingly robust, and it even offers a decent number of Spanish-language novels. The vibe at Porchfest was more frat-boys-drinking-sixers and sunburned golf dads than it was hippies and freaks. The neighborhood is Nice, with plenty of In This House signs declaring Attested Beliefs. We felt more at home in Cabbagetown, with its murals and ambivalence, even if our own presence as fucking tourists made us balk at times. But in a plant shop in Virginia Highland, we did meet an interesting clerk who let me take a photograph of their Pynchon tattoo. So that was pretty cool.

Atlanta I heart you.

 

 

More Remedios Varo in English translation via Margaret Carson (Book acquired, 7 May 2024)

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I’m very happy to have a copy of On Homo rodans and Other Writings, a collection of Remedios Varo’s writings translated and edited by Margaret Carson. This collection expands on the 2018 compendium Letters, Dreams and Other Writings.

Margaret told me via email that On Homo rodans and Other Writings “includes a few new stories and other interesting things that [she] found in the archive in Mexico City in 2022, and also has a rearranged presentation of everything (as requested by the estate).” I hope to have a second interview with Margaret on this new collection soon; in the meantime, check out our conversation from 2019.

(Some) books acquired, April 2024

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April is always a weird month for me, the last few weeks of the spring semester when I try to corral my students (and myself) toward our Grand Project of Just Damn Finishing (while also Learning and Growing as Humans), when the magic of spring break has burned off to memories, scents, traces, when the Florida weather is glorious and perfect, but for only just long enough to get out in the garden before Summer Hell commences.

It’s been a lot of cleaning and clearing out and reorganizing for me, along with meetings with students—and not as much reading as I’d like. I devoured Percival Everett’s novel James early in the month, reading it in just a few days and loved it, but failed to write The Thing I Wanted to Write about it—about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, about lighting out for the Territory, about Leslie Fiedler, about Robert Coover’s Huck Out West. I did manage to shoehorn bits of it into meetings with an American lit class I particularly liked this semester (we’d read Huckleberry Finn back in January). I also read/am reading Max Lawton’s novel-in-progress, The Abode, and reread Max’s translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard. I’ve actually done a lot of re-rereading of Blue Lard, as my project of posting about it seems to get delayed by, like, time constraints and/or exhaustion–

–is this the part where I also rant about my eyes going to seed, my eyes of forty-five years, stalwart fellows for most of those years, but now fading? eyes now needing nose-bridge-irritating lenses to be able to read finer print at first and now not-so-fine print? eyes that will need a new set of so-called readers with a higher rate of magnification simply to comprehend the little marks on the huge copy of RSS’s A Bended Circuity I obtained way back in November of last year? my eyes that are also having a hard time with Dalkey’s reissue of Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, not included in this riff and pic of books acquired in April because it is new, a new printing? I guess that was the eye rant, so—

Oh and so anyway to the used books I picked up this month, mostly over a series of Friday-afternoon-special-treat browsings, their purchase entirely subsidized by trade credit from so, so many books I read my children when they were little and cute, books that they no longer wish to place on their shelves (ever the sentimentalist, I found space in my tiny Florida attic for a box or two for the future—and made an agreement with my son to shelve the Maurice Sendak titles in his room for at least the next few years). Those books–

A collection of Virgilio Piñera short stories translated by Mark Schaffer. I admit I was unaware of the Cuban author’s existence until I came across this edition of Cold Tales (once property of the University of Washington Libraries). The spine attracted me, the cover, bearing a reproduction of Goya’s Saturn Snacking enticed me, and I opened, reading a few of the very short stories within, knowing it’d leave with me.

I picked up John Speicher’s 1971 novel Didman because Thomas Pynchon blurbed it; haven’t opened it since.

I picked up first-edition hardbacks of books I already own and have read, books by Stanley Elkin and Jerzy Kosinski—books I already own, in a few cases, in beautiful trade paperback editions (a Vintage Contemporaries edition of Steps; Elkin novels with covers by my favorite, Janet Halverson)—do I need them? Of course not. But I have so few hobbies, reader; my herbs are in good order; my guitars hold their tunings—and I have more regrets about the first editions I let go by years ago.

Perhaps the oddest one stacked here is a first edition of Dag Hammarskjöld’s posthumous 1963 Markings (translated by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden), which collects the Swedish diplomat’s diary entries from 1925 up through his death in 1961. I found it very much at random (in the literary criticism section, where I don’t think it belongs), picked it up, and kept reading. A brief excerpt:

To be “sociable” —to talk merely because convention forbids silence, to rub against one another in order to create the illusion of intimacy and contact: what an example of la condition humaine. Exhausting, naturally, like any improper use of our spiritual resources. In miniature, one of the many ways in which mankind successfully acts as its own scourge-in the hell of spiritual death.

Christine Brooke-Rose/Miguel de Unamuno (Books acquired, 23 Feb. 2024)

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Picked up Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1984 postmodern novel Amalgamemnon and the Grove Press collection of Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Unamuno the other day. Those three exemplary novels are Marquis of Lubria; Two Mothers; and Nothing Less Than a Man, in translation by Angel Flores. It’s an older edition; Grove Press’s contemporary copy offers the following:

In Two Mothers, the demonic will of a woman runs amok in a whirlwind of maternal power, and in The Marquis of Lumbria, another unforgettable heroine steers a violent course through the dense sea of tradition. By contrast, Nothing Less Than a Man, Unamuno’s most forceful piece of writing, focuses on a truly Nietzchean hero, a man who embodies human will deprived of spiritual strength.

And here’s a bit on Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon from Susie E. Hawkins’ essay “Innovation/History/Politics: Reading Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon” from the Spring 1991 issue of Contemporary Literature:

While the title signals possible mythic revisions of Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, such anticipations on the reader’s part prove to be utterly unfounded. To begin with, there is no “story” as such, there are no “characters,” no “plot,” no “conflict,” and certainly no “climax.” In addition, the fiction is cast entirely in the future and conditional tenses with a few imperatives and subjunctives thrown in. Although Amalgamemnon exhibits few remnants of a traditional narrative desire for unity, presence, psychological accuracy, closure, and so forth, it does do what most innovative writing should do: it challenges the audience in terms of accustomed modes of perception, interpretation, and reading strategies – in short, challenges readerly ideology. In part, this text enacts such a challenge by performing itself, by “being about” language, by being a performance. The text becomes a space in which a cacophony of voices, or discursive amplifications, or babble, or little stories – whichever term best suits — enact their own sounding.

Red Pyramid, Blue Lard | Two from Vladimir Sorokin (Books acquired 5 Feb. 2024)

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Last week I got physical copies of two forthcoming Vladimir Sorokin books, both translated by Max Lawton and both published by NYRB.

Sorokin’s 1999 novel Blue Lard is one of the strangest and most daring books I’ve ever read—simultaneously compelling and repulsive, confounding and rewarding, a novel that twists from scenario to scenario, occasionally looking back at its reader to holler, Hey, catch up! Its English-language translator Max Lawton was kind enough to share his manuscript for Blue Lard with me during a long and enjoyable interview we undertook in the summer of 2022 (around the time of the publication of his translation of Sorokin’s 2014 novel Telluria). While Max was, on one hand, trying to help me better understand Sorokin in context by sharing Blue Lard with me, on the other, I think he was mostly trying to share a really fucking great book with someone who might like it—which is the kind of love one could only hope for from a translator. From our first interview:

BIBLIOKLEPT: Blue Lard might benefit from a brief introduction, so I’ll offer my unasked-for services: “This shit is wild. Just go for it. Don’t try to make it do what you think a novel should be doing. Just go with it.”

ML: BLUE LARD is about that state of confusion—ontological and linguistic—as it unfurls. To introduce the text beyond something like your pithy statement above might be a disservice to the book. The reader should be confused and it should hurt—then feel fucking good ….when reading Sorokin, we’re fucking nostrils with forked dicks (or—getting our nostrils fucked by the same).

The book’s real introduction is the Nietzsche quote at the beginning.

Does FINNEGANS WAKE need an introduction? Is one even possible?

I loved BLUE LARD when I first read it precisely because I had no point of reference for understanding it

Hey but so well guess what! I have another interview with Max on deck! Here’s a bit of a teaser from that interview, again on Blue Lard:

Like TELLURIA, BLUE LARD is all about textures: literary, historical, ideological… However, unlike TELLURIA, BLUE LARD has a telos to it—an endpoint. I am firmly of the belief that BLUE LARD is Vladimir’s best novel. He had taken a long break from prose (about 7 years) before writing it, so this text simply burst forth from him and ended up as a neat showcase of all of his aesthetic preoccupations, but lorded over by an edifice that has proportions none too short of classically harmonious. What should readers expect… hmm.. the first section is rather challenging. One needs to surf its wave and not expect full comprehension. There is a glossary of Chinese words and neologisms at the back of the book, but I’m not sure it’s worth consulting in the expectation of further understanding. The middle section of the book—characterized by a faux-archaic language—is also terribly strange, but with fewer neologisms. The last section of the book—an alternate iteration of Post-WWII Europe—is formally very smooth, but insanely transgressive in terms of content. And I haven’t even mentioned the rather unorthodox parodies of Russian classics in the novel’s first section! What should readers expect? In short: to have their minds blown!

Red Pyramid offers an overview of Sorokin’s development as a writer, collecting stories composed between 1981 and 2018. From Will Self’s introduction:

Fundamental to the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin is not the pornography his detractors accuse him of producing but the paradoxical topologies his carefully spun tales evoke. Each of his stories is a sort of mutant Möbius strip, in which to follow the narrative is to experience the real and the fantastic as simultaneously opposed and coextensive. There comes a point—it may be early on; it may be comparatively late-when the strictures of orthodox plotting seem to overwhelm its author, such that idiom and plain speech converge even as events spiral ineluctably out of human control.

And here’s Joy Williams’ blurb:

Extravagant, remarkable, politically and socially devastating, the tone and style without precedent, the parables merciless, the nightmares beyond outrance, the violence unparalleled, these stories, translated with fearless agility by Max Lawton, showcase the great novelist Vladimir Sorokin at his divinely disturbing best.

(Williams deploys the word outrance here, which was new to me, and I think it fits.)

Books acquired, 26 Jan. 2024

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Last Friday, I drove across a bridge to a library on the other side of the city for a Friends of the Library sale. I was hoping for a nice leisurely afternoon browse, figured I’d find a few titles worth my efforts, and I’d fill out the 10 dollar brown paper grocery bag with books I could trade for store credit elsewhere. I ended up filling the bag almost immediately, mostly with heavy hardbacks, resulting in my weak arm quickly settling into a painful fatigue that killed my browsing vibe.

Here are the books I picked up:

–A paperback copy of Thomas S. Klise’s cult classic The Last Western. It was in the “nonfiction” section, which I didn’t really browse that studiously, but its cover nevertheless stood out to me. I bought a copy of it from an online used bookseller online six years ago (and was very disappointed that the seller had appended a retail barcode sticker to its cover).

–A paperback omnibus of Salem Kirban’s early seventies “prophecy” apocalypse novels 666 and its sequel 1000. I’d thumbed through a worn copy of 666 sometime last year—the title of and its cracked spine calling to me from the shelf of the sci-fi section. Kirban’s “novel” is a millennialist screed conveyed in a tawdry postmodern manner, and it didn’t seem worth the eight bucks the used bookstore was asking at the time—but I didn’t mind snuggling it into the paper bag last Friday, oddity that it is.

–A hardback copy of Don DeLillo’s novel Zero K. I skipped it when it came out, and I don’t think DeLillo’s done anything good since Point Omega.

–A hardback copy of John Barth’s novel Every Third Thought. I think that Barth’s best work is decades behind him, but every now and then I try something newer, and this 2011 novel is one of his shorter recentish efforts.

–A hardback copy of Leni Zumas’ novel Red Clocks. I had never heard of this book, but the spine enticed me enough to pick it up when I was browsing the “sci fi” section at the booksale, and the premise–America has outlawed and criminalized abortion–seemed depressingly dystopian enough to take it with me.

–A hardback copy of Sven Birkert’s collection of literary criticism, An Artificial Wilderness. Includes chapters on Thomas Bernhard, Umberto Eco, Borges, and “The School of Gordon Lish” among many, many others.

–A Vintage Contemporaries Edition of Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, a collection I have not read in over two decades.

–A hardback copy of Jesse Ball’s novel How to Set a Fire and Why. I liked his 2011 novel The Curfew, so maybe I’ll like this?

–A hardback copy of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Frankisstein; reviews of this 2019 novel intrigued me at the time it was published (and I do like a good Frankenstein riff).

–A hardback copy of Robert Coover’s novel Huck Out West. An amazing sequel to Twain’s novel; I reviewed it on this site years ago. This handsome edition shall replace the ugly advance copy I got years ago. I might need to revisit it in anticipation of Percival Everett’s take on Twain’s Huck’s Jim—James.

–A hardback copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s late novel Little Boy, which The Guardian described as a “novel-cum-memoir-cum-grand finale.” (Too much cum, The Guardian.)

–A Library of America edition of The Complete Novels of Eudora Welty. I hate to admit what I will now admit: I love love love Welty’s short stories, but have never read one of her novels.

–A hardback copy of Walker Percy’s Thanatos Syndrome. Again, a late-period work by old master, likely not his finest stuff, but hey. I burned through his first four novels a few years ago—Lancelot was my favorite.

Debbie Urbanski’s After World (Book acquired, Dec. 2023)

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I plan to start into Debbie Urbanski’s debut After World this weekend. Here’s publisher Simon & Schuster’s blurb:

Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.

[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.

As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.

Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses/Max Blecher’s Transparent Body (Books acquired 11 Jan. 2024)

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I was quite excited earlier this week to get a pair of books in new English translations from the Czech publisher Twisted Spoon Press.

I started in on Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses (translated from the German by Alexander Booth) late last night and kept reading and reading, greedily consuming the surreal, poetic “mini dramas” as thought experiments played out in my head. Here’s an early example of one:

practiced biblical saying

catechist : love thy neighbor as thyself.

exegete: i hate myself! (gives the former a hard hook to the chin tho crumples him to the floor).

I’ll admit I didn’t know of Gerhard Rühm, but I’m enjoying Cake & Prostheses and hope to muster a review in the next week or so. Here’s Twisted Spoon’s blurb:

An inveterate experimenter with image and text and music, Gerhard Rühm is truly one of the major figures of the postwar European avant-garde. Yet reprehensibly little of his work has appeared in English. This edition brings together a selection of his work spanning the past seven decades, displaying a wide thematic range (as he has remarked, “there is nothing that cannot become part of one’s poetic universe”) and ingenious combinations of music, pornography, banality, humor, and mythology. The first section comprises “mini dramas,” the text often combined with images and musical notation to create sensorial episodes, the expression of a singular aesthetic perception. The second section is a wry deconstruction of Grillparzer’s play Hero and Leander that juxtaposes original passages with images from a swimming manual and with a more contemporary erotic retelling of the mythological tale. The final section presents 24 short prose pieces: 12 from the early 1950s and 12 from the past few years.

I had heard of the surrealist Romanian poet Max Blecher, but am still largely unfamiliar with his work. Twisted Spoon is publishing his 1934 collection Transparent Body along with some, uh, other texts, in a translation by Gabi Reigh. Blurb:

Blecher’s very first book, the poetry collection Transparent Body, appeared in 1934, in a limited edition for bibliophiles. Yet general recognition as one of the most inventive European writers of his day came only with the publication of two of his three “novels” a few years later. And then he died, at the age of twenty-eight. But since 1930 Blecher had been publishing his poetry, short prose, essays, critiques, and other texts in the leading Romanian periodicals, some even appearing in important French publications, such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. In addition, the past half century has seen the posthumous first publication of many texts in a variety of Romanian editions.

Transparent Body & Other Texts brings together Blecher’s entire output of poetry and short prose, from the earliest texts published during his lifetime to those appearing for the first time only recently. They range from stories in the vein of his fantastical, hallucinatory longer work to aphorisms, reportage, and notebook fragments. The volume also includes a selection of his correspondence with such major figures of Romanian interwar modernism as Geo Bogza, Ilarie Voronca, and Saşa Pană to give a fuller picture of Blecher’s engagement with the avant-garde and literary life even as his health was progressively deteriorating over the course of the 1930s.

Have a weird Xmas (Blog about books acquired in Dec. 2023)

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Maybe an hour ago, browsing in a used bookstore, I opened a worn and some might say dirty copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass. The very first page of this old book was inscribed with the following:

Have a weird Xmas ’90

                 John

This copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass—a 1990 Abacus trade paperback printed in London, the embossing on its cover yellowed by wear on its cover and back near its spine—this particular copy was addressed to no named person, its inscription signed by a name so anonymous we apply it to unidentified cadavers and prostitute clients.

I take myself to be the unidentified person being addressed by the identified generic John, wishing me weird wellness, a ghost of Xmas past.

Earlier this year I made the tragic mistake of not pulling the trigger on first-edition hardbacks of Banks’s first two novels, The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass. I hadn’t read Banks at that point, and my familiarity with his work came almost entirely of his proximity to the J.G. Ballard titles I routinely perused. I ended up reading and loving The Wasp Factory this summer (reviewed it here), and the blurb on the back of Walking on Glass promising further perversions intrigues me too, of course.

Today, I also came across a first-edition, first-U.S.-printing of Roberto Bolaño’s opus 2666. It was marked at a third of the original cover price and has never been read. I could not leave it behind.

I actually traded some books in today, including my trade paperback of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things. I had recently reread the novel in anticipation of Yorgos Lanthimos’ film adaptation, and, during that reread, oddly came across an inexpensive pristine first edition of the novel while browsing for something else. Maybe a week or two after finding that hardback of Poor Things, I found a hardback first edition of Gray’s 1990 novel Something Leather. Unlike Poor Things, which features lots of art and typographic adventures, Something Leather is pretty standard (apart from a few chapter heading illustrations)—but it does have a lovely cover under its cover:

Maybe a week after that, I was browsing with my son, who wanted a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories. I was shocked that we couldn’t find any—I had given away two mass market collections to some students maybe seven or eight years ago in a purge. Apparently a lot of it is out of print, but a “greatest hits” collection is coming out this spring. Anyway, I ended up finding hardback editions of Robert Coover’s Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Denis Johnson’s novel Fiskadaro. 

The Johnson is a British edition, Chatto & Windus, and while it’s hardly my favorite novel by him, I found its form too attractive to pass (and it was, like, cheaper than a beer in the same bookstore). I also picked up a book by Lewis Nordan, a slim collection of short stories called Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. I picked it up because I love those horrid lovely wonderful gross stylish Vintage Contemporaries editions, and then acquired it based on the blurb, which compared it to Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Gilchrist, and Harry Crews. Here it is next to my Vintage Contemporaries copy of Denis Johnson’ Fiskadaro:

I hope you have a weird Xmas. And I hope that John, wherever they are, has a weird Xmas too.

Books acquired, 13 Oct. 2023

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I couldn’t pass on a used copy of the second edition of Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion even though it ate up most of my trade credit. I used the first edition of the Companion when I reread Gravity’s Rainbow about eight years ago and then gave it to a friend I had been encouraging to read GR. He still hasn’t read it.

I also picked up a hardcover first edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and a pristine 1946 hardback edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ll probably trade in the Gabler edition of Ulysses I have, but I think I’m too sentimental to let go of the copy of The Road I read in the hospital over a few days when my daughter was born.

I’m a big fan of Vintage Contemporaries, but I’d never seen Terry McDonell’s California Bloodstock. I pulled it out because of its spine, and found the cover intriguing–it reminded me of these weird paintings that hang in a decrepit hotel in St. Augustine Beach that we stay at for a few nights every year. The blurb from H.S. Thompson didn’t hurt either.

 

I opened it to find that the novel is inscribed:

Anyone know Lou Schultz? Or what SMART might be?

Portis’s Gringos, Essays on Pynchon, Elkin’s End (Books acquired, 29 Sept. 2023)

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So two of the three books I picked up today I’d read before, but I couldn’t pass on the editions.

I read Stanley Elkin’s The Living End last summer, checking a digital version out from the library. I wanted something very short and funny at the time, and it worked wonders. I couldn’t pass up this Warner Books edition with design by Gene Light featuring art by Don Ivan Punchatz. I have a few other Elkins in this series and I adore them, even if my eyes are fading to the point that mass market paperbacks cause me to squint.

I also picked up another book I’ve already read, a book I already own a copy of—Charles Portis’s last novel Gringos. But I didn’t own a first edition with this fun, silly cover.

On the last day of 2020, the year I read Gringos, I wrote:

Gringos was the last of Portis’s five novels. I read the other four greedily last year, and pulled them all out when he passed away in February. I started in on Gringos, casually, then just kept reading. Sweet and cynical, spiked with strange heroism, strange grace, and very, very funny, Gringos might just be my favorite Portis novel. But I’d have to read them all again to figure that out.

I also picked up Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, a 1976 collection that seems ahead of its time. From Scott Sanders’ essay “Pynchon’s Paranoid History”:

Aira/Márquez/Moore (Books acquired, 18 Aug. 2023)

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Last week I read a 1985 Washington Post profile of the American novelist William Gaddis. The profile, by Lloyd Grove, celebrated the publication of Gaddis’s third novel Carpenter’s Gothic. In the profile, Grove paraphrases literary critic Frederick Karl’s 1985 essay “The Mega-Novel” in the following way:

Karl argues that unlike “categories of Jewish novelists, gays, Black writers [and] female authors” who address special interests, “these white Protestant males [Gaddis, Pynchon, John Barth et al.] write very close to what America is,” having “sensed the country as a whole.”

I tracked down and read Karl’s essay “The Mega-Novel”; it is, almost entirely, a sustained argument for the kind of giant-assed so-called “experimental” novels typical of the bracketed Gaddis, Pynchon, and Barth above. And yet Karl seems to slide into and side with Harold Bloom in that old man’s pompous war against the so-called “School of Resentment”; once in the quote above, and then a few pages later, when he chooses to claim that “The Mega-Novelists have avoided the individuation of ethnic, gay, female (or even strictly male) experience and sensed the country as a whole.” Yes—Grove weds this second line in Karl’s covert attack on the “School of Resentment,” this maddening and dismissive “country as a whole” bit to the previous language. The effect is so odd, as if Grove has purposefully ignored every other bit of Karl’s essay and cherry-picked the lines that valorize the Real American Viewpoint™ as White Protestant Straight and Male.

Karl’s essay is, apart from these unnecessary declarations, really quite good—he champions Gaddis’s J R and Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge in particular. And yet I found myself troubled by his claim that it is the dead white guys who write very close to what America is because they sense the country as a whole, in a way that somehow, like, I guess Ishmael Reed or Fran Ross or Toni Morrison or etc. just can’t. And because I’m so simpatico with Karl’s general idea in “The Mega-Novel,” I found myself looking for his 1983 book American Fictions 1940-1980 : A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation.

While I didn’t find it in the literary criticism section of my beloved used bookmine, I did find the second volume of Gaddis-scholar Steven Moore’s The Novel, covering 1600-1800.

I also picked up César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (in translation by Chris Andrews) and Gabriel García Márquez’s In Evil Hour (in translation by Gregory Rabassa). The latter is another title in Avon/Bard’s Latin American authors series, and I can’t resist them.

 

The next day, yesterday, Saturday, I participated in an online discussion about the literature of William Gaddis on non-academic forums. (I represented Ye Olde Bloggers, and I will share more about the forum some time in the future.) Early in our forum, one of the participants, the author Jeff Bursey, raised a copy of Frederick Karl’s American Fictions 1940-1980 in front of his webcam. I believe he declared it one of the first places he’d heard of Gaddis, although I could be misremembering. It seemed like a serendipitous moment. I hope to muster more words on most of this later.

Cortazar/Crowley/Ford (Books acquired, 27 July 2023)

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I went to the bookstore today looking for a copy of Katherine Burdekin’s dystopian 1937 novel Swastika Night. I was unsuccessful there, but while browsing the scifi and fantasy section, I came across three books that I couldn’t resist.

The first was an unread hardcover first edition of John M. Ford’s 1983 novel The Dragon Waiting. This book was only on my radar because Slate republished a 2019 article on Ford by Isaac Butler and a friend sent me the link (his message was simply “?”). From Butler’s article:

The Dragon Waiting is an unfolding cabinet of wonders. Over a decade before George R.R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, Ford created an alternate-history retelling of the Wars of the Roses, filled with palace intrigue, dark magic, and more Shakespeare references than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The Dragon Waiting provokes that rare thrill that one gets from the work of Gene Wolfe, or John Crowley, or Ursula Le Guin. A dazzling intellect ensorcells the reader, entertaining with one hand, opening new doors with another.

Wolfe blurbed the back cover of the copy I bought, by the way.

Maybe Crowley was in my subconscious too; while searching for Swastika Night under the Cs (it was first published under the pseudonym “Murray Constantine”), I came across a cheap hardcover copy of Crowley’s 1976 novel Beasts. I’d read Little, Big years ago, enjoyed it, but gone no further. (There were no copies of Little, Big in Crowley’s placarded section, all though I did find three copies in the “General Fiction” section, away from the beautiful weird scifi fantasy ghetto.)

I’ve long been a sucker for the mass market Avon Bard Latin American writers series, so I couldn’t pass up the copy of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (translated by Gregory Rabassa). It sat upon a miscellaneous, dusty stack of outcasts in the middle of the “D” aisle in the scifi fantasy ghetto, waiting for me.

 

Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)

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Picked up two on Friday—

I’ve been wanting to read Natalia Ginzburg for a while, and when I saw a used copy of her novella The Dry Heart (translated by Frances Frenaye), it seemed like a good entry point. It was really the description on the back that grabbed me:

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

I read NYRB’s collected Moderan a few years ago, but I couldn’t pass up this Avon Bard mass market paperback.

Opening track:

“THINKING BACK (OUR GOD IS A HELPING GOD!)”

by

David R. Bunch

FLESH seemed doomed that year; death’s harpies were riding down. The once-beautiful, sweet and life-sustaining air was tinged with poison now, and man drank at his peril from the streams that had once been pure. He prayed to a God that was said to be in all things good, true and beautiful, but especially was thought to be all sternness and goodness, justice and loving-care, in some milk-white place far away, “On High.” And those prayers if answered were answered very obliquely indeed. For the air got deeper in poison from the tinkering with lethal things the flesh-man indulged in when not praying, and the water got fuller with danger as each new explosion pounded the bomb-fevered air. There was talk of the End; great discussions were handled in great halls across the land. Treaties were signed among statesmen to help the air get better, to allow the streams to recover and run pure once again. But even as the flesh-hands grasped the pens to scrawl the marks of good faith in some countries, fear lashed at capitals in other countries. Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger—There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere. Little children asked that they be allowed to go quickly and not grow up hurting and maimed. Adults in what should have been the full flower of brave manhood and fair womanhood quaked, looked heavenward for some hopeful sign and, finding none, fell down and cried bitterly. The aged ones, quavering and whining now, finally decided that yes, truly they were most glad that they were so very old. The flesh billions courted at the Palace of Danger so ardently had turned against them and the mass wedding of Death and Destruction seemed now all but assured.

And then—and then this chance! Offered to all. It came first as small hope, the rumor of it, a faint faint breath of a chance seeping through the flesh-fouled metropolises. And then it was confirmed as glowing fact when the tour went round that year, year of the Greatest Darkness. And yet—and yet they scoffed, scoffed by the billions at this man working his hinges and braces, would not believe his heart was an ever-last one, had no credulity for his new wonderful lungs that could breathe him a forever-life even in bomb-tainted air. When they saw that his hands were steel they yelled robot! robot! When they saw that his eyes were wide-range, mechanism-helped, and that he’d a phfluggee-phflaggee button on his talker that he pressed from time to time to aid in his speech expression they laughed and yelled . . . Continue reading “Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)” →

Jim Dodge/Steve Erickson (Books acquired, 22 June 2023)

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I picked up my daughter’s assigned summer reading today — Steven King’s On Writing and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. It’s not exactly clear to me if she’s supposed to, like, read, the Strunk & White, although I recall actually reading it when I was around her age, but I also enjoyed reading the thesaurus. The bookstore had a used copy of Penguin’s hardback edition with illustrations by Maira Kalman for only a few bucks more than the cheap paperback copies, so I got it for my daughter. I have the same edition at my office.

wcs

I finally found a copy of Jim Dodge’s 1990 novel Stone Junction. I’d been looking casually looking for it for a few years now, and was pleased to find it in a Canon edition (although the big sticker over the tarot card on the cover is kinda bewildering). If you’re interested in Pynchon’s intro you can read it here. There’s an excerpt from the beginning of the novel here.

I didn’t really mean to pick up Steve Erickson’s third novel, Tours of the Black Clock (1989) but then I did. I mean I went to the Erickson books, picked this one out, started to read the back cover, read the sentence “Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world’s most evil man,” and decided I wanted to read it.” I finished Erickson’s second novel, Rubicon Beach (1986) a few days ago and his first, Days Between Stations (1985) a few weeks ago and I guess I want more of that particular flavor.