Book Looks, Lit Mags & Wish Lists
Karen Brown’s story in the current issue of Five Points is fantastic. Also: Birkenstock nuns! Ummm, band name…
*
Adam Shatz: In Orhan Pamuk’s fiction “happiness is always a thing of the past.”
*
Robert Scheer interviews Martin Jacques about Jacques’ When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (positive if qualified Times review here).
*
I was making an Amazon wish list to distribute the spring semester reading list to my independent study. The last list I’d made was for Christmas 2006, and it’s a little startling how many of books and (non-downloadable) albums have since become unavailable, or are now available only as downloads.
Dana Spiotta’s Eat The Document is out of print, but available from $ 0.01. You can still get the European version of Saint Etienne’s Tiger Bay on CD; worth it for the lovely “I Buy American Records” (!). Harold Brodkey’s gorgeous This Wild Darkness: The Story Of My Death is also out of print but available from $0.01, apparently the going rate. When Brodkey disciplines his larger arc, as he does in Wild Darkness, his sentence structures are so beautifully expansive:
I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.
Jeffrey Eugenides reads and discusses Brodkey’s short story “Spring Fugue” in a New Yorker podcast.
