The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 1998

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 1998

Dream for Us a Different World: Introducing Curtis White.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... I think of Curtis White as the model of the child-of-the-sixties as writer. Born in 1951 and raised in San Lorenzo, California, in a postwar, prefabricated housing development, White came of age in the political turbulence of the late sixties,...

Hippies, Madness, and the Revolution of Everyday Life: An E-Mail Conversation.(Interview)
June 22, 1998... Curtis White lives in the heart of the heart of the country, Normal, Illinois, where he teaches at Illinois State University. ISU, for those who don't know, is home to the Unit for Contemporary Literature, the most active literary publishing...

I Am Artist; I Make Beautiful Things: A Credo of Sorts Concerning the New Beauty.
June 22, 1998... "In his work a purely musical residue stubbornly persists." --Theodor Adorno on the music of Gustav Mahler I'm embarrassed by my title. It has gotten difficult for me to say the words art and beauty. These two words--when I forget...

From America's Magic Mountain.(Excerpt)(Fiction)
June 22, 1998... America's Magic Mountain is a rewriting of Thomas Mann's famous novel set at a fictional recovery spa called The Elixir located among a range of slag heaps in Central Illinois. The Elixir has "gone autonomous." Its leader is Mayor Jesse. ...

Musial and McCartney--Together Again for the First Time.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... Our cumulative failure to understand and claim our opportunities is the large part of our poverty. --The Idea of Home In the title story of Metaphysics in the Midwest the acutely alcoholic Professor Feeling, under suspicion of child...

Dedication to Doubt: Curtis White's The Idea of Home and the Function of Fiction.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... We walked into the record store and saw the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought together, "Life can be other than it has been." (The Idea of Home 156) Well, there's the darkly wonderful, Raymond Carver-esque...

Eden, the American West, and Temporary Autonomous Zones: Imagining Utopia in Curtis White's Postmodern Home.
June 22, 1998... Curtis White and Allen McAfrica have a lot in common. Both are inventive, restless storytellers. Both hail from San Lorenzo, California. Both make an appearance in White's third book, The Idea of Home. Wounded sons of the exhausted American...

Comic Depth: Curtis White's Laughable Idea of Home.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... "And where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything:"--so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all Joyful Wisdom--Well, then! Let us show that it is a prejudice! Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom The...

Location Is Everything: Community and Individuality in the Novels of Curtis White.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... Shortly before his death, Bruce Chatwin wrote in his last book, The Song Lines, of his belief that the wandering aboriginal people of Australia had thoroughly mapped and explored their continent centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. It...

"Blessed by Madness": Memories of My Father Watching TV.(Curtis White)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... "My mind's not right." --Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour" "I started writing because I had bad brains." --Curtis White, Interview with Mark Amerika During an honors seminar in twentieth-century fiction at the University of San...

A Curtis White Checklist.
June 22, 1998... Fiction Heretical Songs. New York: Fiction Collective, 1980. Metaphysics in the Midwest. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1988. The Idea of Home. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1992. Anarcho-Hindu. Normal: Black Ice Books/FC2, 1995. Memories of My...

Milorad Pavic: "He Thinks the Way We Dream".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... When French and American critics, writing about Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, wrote "We are all Khazars," they meant this as a paradigm for the troubled eighties, plagued by ecological pollution, nuclear menace, and the threat of a global...

As a Writer, I Was Born Two Hundred Years Ago.(Interview)
June 22, 1998... Milorad means beloved in his language. Milorad Pavic is unknown to many of you. He is a Serbian writer, nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to Paris Match, "he is undoubtedly the first writer of the...

The Beginning and the End of Reading--The Beginning and the End of the Novel.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... The novel is like cancer. It lives on its metastases and is fed on them. Long ago I started putting to myself a question: Where are the beginning and the end of the novel? Does the novel start with Homer? And does the story about the...

From Last Love in Constantinople.(Excerpt)(Fiction)
June 22, 1998... Special Key THE FOOL In addition to his mother tongue, he also spoke Greek, French, Italian and Turkish; he was born in Trieste into a family of Serbian merchants and patrons of the theater, who had ships in the Adriatic and wheat and...

Dictionary of the Khazars as an Epistemological Metaphor.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... Comments, reviews, articles, and monographs on Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars demonstrate a wide range of ways of approaching, understanding, and interpreting this fascinating, bewildering, and bewitching "Lexicon Novel in 100,000...

Culture as Memory: On the Poetics of Milorad Pavic.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... "Here the world of the fantastic intruded into the world of the real," as it says at a central point in Jorge Luis Borges's Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. It is precisely this phenomenon of the increasing intrusion of the fantastic into...

Dictionary of the Khazars as a Khazar Jar.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... In an article on nonmimetic literature entitled "The Khazar Jar and Other False Memories,"(1) Milorad Pavic cites the entry "The Khazar Jar" from his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, in which a student dream-reader receives as a gift what seems...

Chaos, Knowledge, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in Dictionary of the Khazars.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... People think reality is another word for chaos. But in reality it is more complex. Legend embodies it in a sound that enables it to spread all over the world. --Laibach, "Death in Conversation," in Kapital (Mute Records, 1992) ...

Landscape Painted with Tea as an Ecological Novel.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... "Suddenly I freeze. I sense, I clearly sense, somebody watching me. Somebody's eyes are fixed upon me. And then I realize that staring out at me from my glasses, quite near, is my right eye transformed into my left...." --Milorad Pavic,...

Pavic's The Inner Side of the Wind: A Postmodern Novel.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... Discussing the importance of the art form, Tolstoy said in 1902: "I think that every artist must create his own art forms. If the contents of art works can be infinitely diverse, so should be their forms." Tolstoy further recalled that the best...

Milorad Pavic and Hyperfiction.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 1998... Robert Coover, in his seminal essay "The End of Books" and in his larger article "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer,"(1) speaks about a phenomenon that appeared in America during the postmodern period and then spread to Europe and Japan. It...

A Milorad Pavic Checklist.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... Books Palimpsesti/Palimpsests. Belgrade, 1967. Istorija srpske knjizevnosti baroknog doba / History of Serbian Literature in the Age of the Baroque (17th-18th Centuries). Belgrade, 1970. Mesecev kamen /Moon Stone. Belgrade, 1971....

No Laughing Matter: The Life & Times of Flann O'Brien.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Anthony Cronin. No Laughing Matter: The Life & Times of Flann O'Brien. Fromm, 1998. 260 pp. $29.95. Originally published in England in 1989, Anthony Cronin's excellent biography of Flann O'Brien is finally available to readers in the...

Twelve Stories.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Guy Davenport. Twelve Stories. Counterpoint, 1997. 236 pp. Paper: $14.00. Guy Davenport, fabulist and scholar, is a champion of knowledge and wit, one of the rare writers nowadays who, without condescension, depends on his readers to have...

Collected Works, Volume III: 1987-1997.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Paul Metcalf. Collected Works, Volume III: 1987-1997. Coffee House, 1997. 524 pp. $35.00. This volume completes our opportunity to read one of the most original minds of the century in his own preferred manner, to read his works in the...

Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Donald Barthelme. Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. Intro. John Barth. Random House, 1997. 332 pp. $27.50. Not-Knowing collects much of Barthelme's nonfiction that, the editor explains, "only...

Bodies of Work.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Kathy Acker. Bodies of Work. Serpent's Tail, 1997. 175 pp. Paper: $16.00. Bodies of Work is an exquisite catalog of art and culture. Ever suspicious of any specter of control, Acker questions our various obsessions with the internet, the...

1920 Diary.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Isaac Babel. 1920 Diary. Ed. and intro. Carol J. Avins. Trans. H. T. Willetts. Yale Univ. Press, 1997. 192 pp. Paper: $13.00. During the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, concealing his Jewish identity under a Russian pseudonym, Babel served as a war...

You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Millicent Dillon. You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Univ. of California Press, 1998. 340 pp. $27.50. This latest book on Paul Bowles, whose title is taken from one of Bowles's short stories, will likely provoke ambivalent feelings...

Defiance.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Carole Maso. Defiance. Button, 1998. 272 pp. $23.95. Carole Maso has suggested "there might be ways in language to express the things that exist at the extreme peripheries of speech." Though she made this comment in an essay on her last...

The Crystal Frontier.
June 22, 1998... Carlos Fuentes. The Crystal Frontier. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. 266 pp. $23.00. Originally written in Spanish in the aftermath of California's Proposition 187, The Crystal Frontier, as the title suggests, adopts...

No Lease on Life.
June 22, 1998... Lynne Tillman. No Lease on Life. Harcourt Brace, 1998. 179 pages. $21.00. The rigorously close, third-person narration in No Lease on Life allows for neither editorializing commentary nor the evasions of an "I." Rather, what the reader...

Night Train.
June 22, 1998... Martin Amis. Night Train. Harmony, 1997. 175 pp. $20.00. Boasting a cast of characters that includes a Colonel Tom, Doctor No, Professor Faulkner, and Doctor Tulkinghorn, as well as a restaurant called Yeats's, a street called Whitman, and...

Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, A Beastly Guide through the Writer's Labyrinth.
June 22, 1998... Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, A Beastly Guide through the Writer's Labyrinth. Illustrated by Rikki Ducornet. Pantheon, 1998.204 pp. $23.00. Cross the practicality of Strunk and White, the Gothic...

The Puttermesser Papers.
June 22, 1998... Cynthia Ozick. The Puttermesser Papers. Knopf, 1997. 236 pp. $23.00. The Puttermesser Papers is Cynthia Ozick's elegant, searing, and darkly humorous tale of the impossibilities and paradoxes of paradise found and paradise lost. The novel...

Some of the Dharma.
June 22, 1998... Jack Kerouac. Some of the Dharma. Viking, 1997. 420 pp. $32.95. Some of the Dharma will not replace On the Road or Dharma Bums as carside reading. It lacks the rush of events that have now led yet another generation to discover Kerouac...

Collected Prose.
June 22, 1998... Charles Olson. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Intro. Robert Creeley. Univ. of California Press, 1997. 472 pp. $50.00; paper $19.95. Olson sought trace, prime. "I find it awkward to call myself a poet or a...

Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday.
June 22, 1998... Italo Calvino, ed. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam. Pantheon, 1997.588 pp. $30.00. Originally collected in two volumes in 1983 in Italy, Calvino's Fantastic Tales, available for the first time in English and...

Anthology of Black Humor.
June 22, 1998... Andre Breton. Anthology of Black Humor. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. City Lights, 1997.356 pp. Paper: $18.95. In the twenties, it's said, via Freud the world discovered sex. About the same time, Andre Breton discovered surrealism--or was it the...

Omon Ra.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New Directions, 1998. 154 pp. Paper: $9.95 Pelevin's works reminds one of Thomas Pynchon's, but of course, with a certain Russian twist. Omon Ra, his first novel, dedicated to the "heroes...

The Blue Lantern and Other Stories.(Review)
June 22, 1998... The Blue Lantern and Other Stories. Trans Andrew Bromfield. New Directions, 1997. 179 pp. $22.95. Pelevin's works reminds one of Thomas Pynchon's, but of course, with a certain Russian twist. Omon Ra, his first novel, dedicated to the...

The Life of Insects.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Victor Pelevin. The Life of Insects. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 179 pp. $22.00. Life of Insects makes a case for Victor Pelevin as a major literary talent in his native Russia and throughout the world. If Oman...

Solibo Magnificent.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Patrick Chamoiseau. Solibo Magnificent. Trans. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov. Pantheon, 1998.208 pp. $23.00 The publication of Rejouis and Vinokurov's translation of Solibo Magnificent firmly ensconces Chamoiseau in the English...

Texaco.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Texaco. Trans. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov. Vintage, 1997. 404 pp. Paper: $14.00. The publication of Rejouis and Vinokurov's translation of Solibo Magnificent firmly ensconces Chamoiseau in the English language. Last year saw...

Thirty-Three Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Ingo Schulze. Thirty-Three Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories. Trans. John E. Woods. Knopf, 1998. 306 pp. $23.00. This subtle, uncanny collection must be read closely. It is as mysterious, grotesque, and beautiful as a Gogol...

The Embroidered Shoes.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Can Xue. The Embroidered Shoes. Trans. Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang. Henry Holt, 1997.221 pp. $20.00. "The Recorder sat in his roadside shed writing down the various dreamlands described by passersby." Other than a discrepancy of...

Jack Maggs.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Peter Carey. Jack Maggs. Knopf, 1998. 306 pp. $24.00. Peter Carey's five previous novels have been lauded for their "Dickensian" wealth of incident and characterization. In Jack Maggs Carey takes his Victorian forefathers by the sideburns,...

Larry's Party.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Carol Shields. Larry's Party. Viking, 1997. 339 pp. $23.95. George F. Babbitt meet Larry Weller. Larry is the eponymous hero of Carol Shields's new novel, an ordinary guy from a lower-middle-class background who rises during the course of...

Rosa.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Knut Hamsun. Rosa. Trans. Sverre Lyngstad. Sun & Moon, 1998. 254 pp. Paper: $12.95. A Nobel laureate, Hamsun is often regarded as Scandinavia's greatest novelist. When he was nine, his family was obliged to surrender him as a laborer to...

The Voice Imitator.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Thomas Bernhard. The Voice Imitator. Trans. Kenneth J. Northcott. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997. 104 pp. $17.95. Thomas Bernhard's book of extremely short fictions, all less than a page long and some shorter than this review, is not as...

Man or Mango?: A Lament.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Lucy Ellmann. Man or Mango?: A Lament. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 240 pp. $22.00. Man or Mango? is a fictional collage composed of many narrative voices interspersed with pictures, drawings, excerpts from a (fictional) student's...

Former Virgin.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Cris Mazza. Former Virgin. FC2, 1997. 145 pp. Paper: $11.95. As the title suggests, Former Virgin is a handful of stories (thirteen) devoted to the sacrifice of innocence. At first glance the characters might seem normal, even typical, but...

Bukowski: A Life.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Neeli Cherkovski. Bukowski: A Life. Steerforth, 1997. 352 pp. Paper: $18.00; Writers such as Charles Bukowski or Thomas Wolfe, whose fictions constitute virtual autobiographies, are perhaps the most difficult for biographers to deal with...

The Buk Book: Musings on Charles Bukowski.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Jim Christy. The Buk Book: Musings on Charles Bukowski. Photos by Claude Powell. ECW Press, 1997. 89 pp. Paper: $12.95. Writers such as Charles Bukowski or Thomas Wolfe, whose fictions constitute virtual autobiographies, are perhaps the...

Self-Imitation of Myself.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Gordon Lish. Self-Imitation of Myself. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. 335 pp. $22.00. Gordon Lish's Self-Imitation of Myself is his first entirely new collection of short fiction since Mourner at the Door. Clocking in at forty-six stories...

The Mirror of Ideas.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Michel Tournier. The Mirror of Ideas. Trans. Jonathan F. Krell. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998. 137 pp. $25.00. One's response to the work of Michel Tournier is likely to fall on either side of a great divide, drawn there by political as...

Our Asian Journey.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Dallas Wiebe. Our Asian Journey. Mir Editions Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Onterio, N2L 3C3, Canada), 1997. 439 pp. Paper: $30.00. Dallas Wiebe's strange philosophical fiction has been published by small presses since the...

Blood Lake and Other Stories.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Jim Krusoe. Blood Lake and Other Stories. Boaz, 1997. 158 pp. $18.50. This is the first collection of stories from the founding editor of the Santa Monica Review, publisher of many excellent authors, including Rikki Ducornet, Ron Sukenick,...

Echoes.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Dennis Barone. Echoes. Potes & Poets, 1997. 172 pp. Paper: $14.00. Echoes collects twenty-eight pieces that can't be called fiction, poetry, essay, biography, or autobiography; between one to fifty pages, the pieces are instead prose...

Not Quite Fiction.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Stephen-Paul Martin. Not Quite Fiction. Vatic Hum, 1997. 115 pp. Paper: $8.95. Don't let the blurbs on the back cover of this extraordinary book fool you: these "essay-fictions" are not cloudy memoirs of a repressed childhood,...

Private Confessions.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Ingmar Bergman. Private Confessions. Trans. Joan Tate. Arcade, 1997. 161 pp. $19.95. Ingmar Bergman has retired from film directing but still directs plays and writes. He has written a two-volume autobiography, plus three novels and their...

Fear of Blue Skies.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Richard Burgin. Fear of Blue Skies. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997. 184 pp. $19.95. Richard Burgin is the editor of Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer and Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the editor of Boulevard...

Hecate and Vagadu.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Pierre Jean Jouve. Hecate and Vagadu. Trans. Lydia Davis. Marlboro/ Northwestern Univ. Press, 1997. 145 and 175 pp. $24.95 each. Known primarily as a poet and essayist, Pierre Jean Jouve (1887-1976) wrote his only novels between 1925 and...

The Hundred Brothers.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Donald Antrim. The Hundred Brothers. Vintage, 1998. 206 pp. Paper: $12.00. Before the dusk of this short novel's one evening, Doug, the narrator and 1 percent of the novel's hundred brothers, witnesses sufficient evidence of fraternal...

The World Is the Home of Love and Death.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Harold Brodkey. The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Metropolitan, 1997. 312 pp. $25.00. Although some critics dislike Brodkey's texts because their style is convoluted, narcissistic, and "imitative"--I think of Proust and James--they...

Stealing My Rules.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Don Webb. Stealing My Rules. Cyber-Psychos AOD, 1997. 74 pp. Paper: $5.00. At the turn of the last century Alfred Jarry invented protopomo "Pataphysics," or "the science of imaginary solutions" as he called it in Exploits and Opinions of...

Steppe.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Ilma Rakusa. Steppe. Trans. Solveig Emerson. Burning Deck, 1997.77 pp. Paper: $10.00. In Novelistic Love in the Platonic Tradition Jennie Wang argues that "lover's discourse" is a "socially privileged language" postmodernists must disrupt....

Eels.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Sadi Ranson. Eels. Salamanca/Alyscamps (35, rue de L'Esperance, 75013 Paris, France), 1997.92 pp. No price given. Eels is a slim, elegantly produced book comprising forty-two selected poems and a novella. The volume's actual physical...

E. Luminata.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Diamela Eltit. E. Luminata. Trans. and Afterword by Ronald Christ, with Gene Bell-Villada, Helen Lane, and Catalina Parra. Lumen, Inc., 1997.234 pp. Paper: $15.00. E. Luminata is an active unworking, a vigorous defying of psychological...

Kentuckiana.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Johnny Payne. Kentuckiana. TriQuarterly/Northwestern Univ. Press, 1997. 255 pp. $24.95. Kentuckiana is fiction writer and playwright Johnny Payne's second novel, and it is a finely written, completely entertaining work, indeed. Set in...

Hell.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Kathryn Davis. Hell. Ecco, 1998. 179 pp. $22.00. This postmodern novel by Kathryn Davis (Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Leaf) uses food as the central metaphor for safety and order, a metaphor which fails to sustain two families, one a...

Like.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Ali Smith. Like. Virago (London), 1997. 343 pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]. The first 150 pages of Like are captivating because at their narrative center is an eight-year-old girl by the name of Kate whose bemused and intelligent curiosity...

Below the Line.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Sara Chin. Below the Line. City Lights, 1997. 149 pp. Paper: $9.95. The Chinese-American characters in Sara Chin's collection of short stories and vignettes are trying to fit themselves in: into families, freeways, grocery stores,...

Conjunctions 29, Tributes: American Writers on American Writers.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Martine Bellen, Lee Smith, and Bradford Morrow, eds. Conjunctions 29: Tributes: American Writers on American Writers. Bard College, 1997. 405 pp. Paper: $12.00. The editors of this special issue of Conjunctions describe Tributes as "an...

Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke, eds. Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited. Little, Brown, 1997.250 pp. $23.95. Joyful Noise is an eclectic collection of essays on religion in general and the New Testament in particular by mostly young,...

The Swordfish.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Hugo Claus. The Swordfish. Peter Owen, 1997. 104 pp. 14.95 [pounds sterling]. This novella by Hugo Claus, Belgium's most famous contemporary writer, partly accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to show the creating and destroying...

Cardboard Castles.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Mark Axelrod. Cardboard Castles. Pacific Writers, 1996. 233 pp. Paper: $16.95 Axelrod's novel is a moving and at times hilarious adventure through one writer's life of the imagination, the intellect, and the libido. The novel introduces...

Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis's Fiction of Longing.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Christopher J. Knight. Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis's Fiction of Longing. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 302 pp. Paper: $24.95. This is the most complete study of Gaddis's fiction to date, and it provides highly stimulating readings of...

Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr.(Review)
June 22, 1998... James R. Giles. Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1998. 164 pp. $24.95. At last a book on Selby, a mere thirty-four years after the publication of his first novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was followed by...

Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Timothy S. Murphy. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Univ. of California Press, 1998. 276 pp. $45.00; paper: $17.95. "Burroughs' work," Timothy S. Murphy declares, "constitutes an exacting critique both of the social...

Understanding Camilo Jose Cela.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Lucile C. Charlebois. Understanding Camilo Jose Cela. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1998. 187 pp. $29.95. It has been fifty years since Cela published La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942; English translation published in 1964 as The Family...

Angela Carter.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Linden Peach. Angela Carter. St. Martin's, 1998. 183 pp. $35.00. By including Angela Carter in its Modern Novelists series, St. Martin's Press has inducted her into the pantheon of important twentieth-century authors--a well-deserved...

God and the American Writer.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Alfred Kazin. God and the American Writer. Knopf, 1997.272 pp. $25.00. Early on in this informal study, Kazin explains that he is "interested not in the artist's professions of belief but in the imagination he brings to his tale of...