“The continued publication and popular packaging of [Roberto Bolaño’s] incomplete work may actually be diluting his reputation as a writer of varied talents and fearless ambition.” Sam Carter is wary of The Roberto Bolaño Bubble.
The Roberto Bolaño Bubble
New Miéville Fiction
There’s new fiction from China Miéville up at Tor. Miéville’s been a Millions darling for quite some time now, as these two pieces from Bill Morris can attest.
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For the Imagination Impaired
If your ego is so large that it blots out your ability to identify with characters who don’t bear your own name U Star Novels offers a solution. The company will replace the names of characters in famous novels with those of your family and friends.
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Bread, Bread, Bread
From “Insufficient Milk And Restraint” to “Eating Berries While Pretending To Be A Monk To Make Hunger And Desperation Feel Like A Game,” here is every meal from Jane Eyre ranked in terms of severity.
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The Modernist Master of Sci-Fi?
If you enjoyed David Auerbach‘s piece on Thomas M. Disch, we recommend you check out this overdue profile of Samuel R. Delany, whose magnum opus, Dhalgren, truly is “like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome.”
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Finding God by the Creek
“The striking thing about her search for God is that she sometimes finds him. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’s second chapter, after a kind of introduction, is titled ‘Seeing.’ There are two kinds, she explains. The common variety is active, where you strain, against the running babble of internal monologue, to pay attention to what’s actually in front of you. But, she tells us, ‘there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.’ You do not seek, you wait. It isn’t prayer; it is grace. The visions come to you, and they come from out of the blue.” On Annie Dillard’s turn to silence.
You ninnie-hammer flycatcher!
Short on insult fodder? In that case you’ll want to read Colin Burrow’s review of Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. It includes such notables as: “slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly lowts … slutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, [and] codshead loobies.” In the end, “swearing is one of the most basic human acts,” he writes.
Cynthia Nixon to Play Emily Dickinson
Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon has been tapped to play Emily Dickinson in a new biopic from Terence Davies. In a lucky break for that film’s stylists and wardrobe people, the number of extant photographs of Dickinson has recently doubled.
A needed perspective, although the Bolaño Legacy argument makes more sense than the “He’s taking the space of other translated works in NA” one. He might take up a greater part of the literary conversation, but I’m not publishers would necessarily be translating more Latin-American fiction if Bolaño’s posthumous works weren’t around.
People are finally figuring this out? They’ve been churning out subpar Bolano collections for years, much of it mindlessly repetitive.