The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2006

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2006

Steven Millhauser.(Biography)
March 22, 2006... Introduction Since his debut in 1972, Steven Millhauser has published novels, short story collections, and novella collections to widespread critical acclaim and, until recently, little popular attention. When he earned the Pulitzer Prize...

Cohabitation: on "Revenge," by Steven Millhauser.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present, and future give the house...

"A game we no longer understood": theatrical audiences in the fiction of Steven Millhauser.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... The Collective as Audience Critics have previously noted the recurrence of first-person, plural narration in Steven Millhauser's The Knife Thrower and Other Stories. In the title story, a town's residents await the knife thrower's...

Architecture and Structure in Steven Millhauser's Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Architecture is a vital component in Martin Dressler: The Tale of An American Dreamer, serving an almost metonymic purpose: a close analysis of architecture reveals not only its own function within the novel, but also the greater generic...

A Steven Millhauser checklist.(Bibliography)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Novels Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright. New York: Knopf, 1972; New York: Vintage, 1996. Portrait of a Romantic. New York: Knopf, 1977; New York: Washington Square Press,...

Acknowledgments.
March 22, 2006... Danielle Alexander thanks Alicita Rodriguez for the original conception for this project and for acting as liaison with Steven Millhauser; Pedro Ponce for compiling the issue's scholarly apparatus; and both for their generous and intelligent...

Dear editor.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Dear Editor: I'm very in love with my husband, even though lately I've been involved with another man. That's the way things go in life, I guess. Well, my question is this. When I'm going to see this other man, I always bring our dog with me...

Witold Gombrowicz. Cosmos.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Witold Gombrowicz. Cosmos. Trans. Danuta Borchardt. Yale Univ. Press, 2005. 208 pp. $25.00. Gombrowicz's last novel in its first English translation directly from the Polish, Cosmos takes us on a rather unsettling school holiday with...

Lydie Salvayre. La Methode Mila.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Lydie Salvayre. La Methode Mila. Seuil, 2005. 222 pp. 18.00 [euro]. The narrator of Lydie Salvayre's latest novel is a forty-year-old bachelor by the name of Fausto Arjona. He is a solitary, misanthropic man who has withdrawn from the...

William H. Gass. A Temple of Texts: Essays.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... William H. Gass. A Temple of Texts: Essays. Knopf, 2006. 412 pp. $26.95. Aside from being a great novelist, Gass is arguably the smartest and most stylistically perceptive American essayist alive today. This latest collection includes...

John Banville. The Sea.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... John Banville. The Sea. Knopf, 2005. 208 pp. $23.00. Max Morden made a vocation out of a remonstration. At seven, preparing for his First Communion, Max was admonished by a zealous priest to eschew the mortal sin of looking. Nevertheless,...

Kenneth Koch. The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Kenneth Koch. The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch. Coffee House Press, 2005. 408 pp. Paper: $18.00. The bulk of this volume consists of what are typically categorized as a novel, The Red Robins, and a collection of eighty-five very short...

Rick Moody. The Diviners.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Rick Moody. The Diviners. Little, Brown, 2005. 567 pp. $25.95. The Diviners, Rick Moody's big, brilliant new novel, is about a hot miniseries project, a thirteen-part epic stretching from ancient Mongolia to the founding of Las Vegas, held...

Robert Coover. A Child Again.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Robert Coover. A Child Again. McSweeney's, 2005. 276 pp. $22.00. Readers of experimentalist Robert Coover will find themselves in familiar territory with his newest story collection, A Child Again. Here the author of Pricksongs & Descants...

Julian Barnes. Arthur & George.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Julian Barnes. Arthur & George. Knopf, 2006. 390 pp. $24.95. Julian Barnes has long enjoyed creating fictionalized versions of historical personages and events, as early work like Flaubert's Parrot or the "Shipwreck" chapter of A History of...

Paul Auster. The Brooklyn Follies.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Paul Auster. The Brooklyn Follies. Holt, 2006. 306 pp. $24.00. Like Paul Auster's other recent novels, The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night, The Brooklyn Follies is a postmodern page-turner, drawing us immediately into its narrator's...

David Albahari. Gotz and Meyer.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... David Albahari. Gotz and Meyer. Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac. Harcourt, 2005. 168 pp. $23.00. Gotz and Meyer is, as the press release states, "the extraordinary story of the mass murder of Serbia's Jews in 1942 as told by a teacher whose...

Magdalena Tulli. Moving Parts.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Magdalena Tulli. Moving Parts. Trans. Bill Johnston. Archipelago Books, 2005. 133 pp. $22.00. The second of Tulli's works published by Archipelago, Moving Parts is an invigorating puzzle of grammar and narrative that takes the reader on a...

Nenad Velickovic. Lodgers.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Nenad Velickovic. Lodgers. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2005. 200 pp. $16.95. This seemingly artless tale, the first of Velickovic's works translated into English, displays the fortitude of the people of Sarajevo...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Memories of My Melancholy Whores.(Brief article)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Trans. Edith Grossman. Knopf, 2005. 101 pp. $20.00. Garcia Marquez fans will be delighted to see that, after years of nonfiction, he has a new novella out. It contains his trademark...

Joshua Cohen. The Quorum.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Joshua Cohen. The Quorum. Twisted Spoon Press, 2005. 193 pp. Paper: $14.00. Jonathan R. is crossing a tightrope of his own intestines. He has just noted how pleased he is to think that "contrary to Euclid and Spinoza... somewhere our...

Michael Martone. Michael Martone.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Michael Martone. Michael Martone. FC2, 2005. 190 pp. Paper: $15.95. The playful, inventive, and daring Martone gives us a short story collection, but his "stories" are quite odd--they are told as "Contributor's Notes"; they juxtapose "real"...

Karel Capek. The Absolute at Large.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Karel Capek. The Absolute at Large. Intro. Stephen Baxter. Bison Books, 2005. 242 pp. Paper: $16.95. The industrialist G. H. Bondy faces economic catastrophe in the opening pages of Karel Capek's satirical novel The Absolute at Large. With...

Richard Kalich. Charlie P.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Richard Kalich. Charlie P. Green Integer, 2005. 240 pp. Paper: $12.95. One critic recently condemned a novel for being "familiar," as if somehow novels could be unfamiliar. No paragraphs. No language. Heck--no paper or ink or binding....

Richard Burgin. The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Richard Burgin. The Identity Club. Ontario Review Press, 2005. 330 pp. Paper: $24.95. "Less is more, more or less," says a young writer across the creative-writing desk. No one knows how to respond to this slogan, whose meaninglessness...

Elizabeth Block. A Gesture Through Time.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Elizabeth Block. A Gesture Through Time. Spuyten Duyvil, 2005. 280 pp. Paper: $14.00. "It is impossible to do without love altogether," Marguerite Duras writes in an epigraph Elizabeth Block cites at the beginning of A Gesture Through...

Donna Seaman. Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Donna Seaman. Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books. Paul Dry Books. 2005. 467 pp. $24.95. Vendela Vida, ed. The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. Believer Books, 2005. 485 pp. Paper: $18.00. When a writer is interviewed,...

Books received.
March 22, 2006... Ardizzone, Tony, ed. The Habit of Arts. Indiana Univ. Press, 2005. $50.00. (F) Arvio, Sarah. Sono. Knopf, 2006. $23.00. (P) Balina, Marina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky, eds. Politicizing Magic. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2005....