“Fate,” Tom Clark:
“Syncope,” Raymond Queneau:
“Jesus Awake,” Anne Sexton:
Michael Nethercott’s The Séance Society. Blurbish review from Publisher’s Weekly:
Nethercott’s first full-length novel, a classically styled Holmesian whodunit set in 1956, introduces Lee Plunkett, an underemployed PI following reluctantly in his late father’s detective footsteps, and Mr. O’Nelligan, a charmingly low-key and literary-minded Irishman. Together they investigate the death of Trexler Lloyd, a rich eccentric, egomaniac, and patron of the arts of spirit communication, who appears to have been electrocuted at a private demonstration of “the Spectricator,” a device for speaking with the dead, at his home in Braywick, Conn. The plot manages to be twisty while proceeding logically, though the unanalyzed clues are often obvious enough that the reader must assume that Plunkett is none too clever and the smarter O’Nelligan is holding his cards close before the grand gathering and reveal. The household’s collection of psychics, servants, and ghosts are a colorful lot, but in the end are merely quirky where they could have been hilariously bold. Agent: Susan Gleason, Susan Gleason Literary Agency
INTERVIEWER
Your own influences—whom would you like to cite as your spiritual ancestors?
BARTHELME
They come in assorted pairs. Perelman and Hemingway. Kierkegaard and Sabatini. Kafka and Kleist. Kleist was clearly one of Kafka’s fathers. Rabelais and Zane Grey. The Dostoyevsky of Notes from Underground. A dozen Englishmen. The surrealists, both painters and poets. A great many film people, Buñuel in particular. It’s always a stew, isn’t it? Errol Flynn ought to be in there somewhere, and so should Big Sid Catlett, the drummer.
(More/via/about; then even more).
I was lucky enough this past Friday the 13th to pick up two Borges volumes, lovely twins with tactile covers, running over 500 pages each—they swallow a lot of Borges books I already own (although curiously leave out entire collections). I found a heartfelt note from mother to son in one the nonfiction collection, where she explains the difficulty she had with the book. I have my own Borges anxieties. Two from the collections: first, from the fiction and then the start of a list from the nonfiction.
