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The Book of Job - Publisher: Vintage
- Year: 1992
- Pages: 176
The Book of Job continues a recent trend of books I’ve read that I received as gifts—specifically from my brother, who has similar taste.
Posts tagged `literature`
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The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes - Publisher: Vintage
- Year: 2008
- Pages: 224
I am no stranger to McSweeney’s publications. I’ve previously reviewed Mountain Man Dance Moves and Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans; I’ve also got a subscription to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, visit the website regularly, and have read numerous authors from the McSweeney’s label. Needless to say, I have at least a passing familiarity with the content and style of McSweeney’s publications.
Why do all the writers I like kill themselves?
David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest and a lot of other things, as well as one of the most ferociously intelligent and talented writers I have ever had the pleasure of reading, hanged himself on Friday, September 12.
Wallace, who wrote with an explosive, ironic, but deeply serious passion about subjects ranging from tennis and politics to mathematics and cruise ships, was found dead by his wife in his home Friday night, according to the Claremont, Calif., police department. The 46-year-old author apparently hanged himself.
“He was the best of our generation, and his death is a loss beyond describing,” Richard Powers, winner of the National Book Award in 2006 for the novel The Echo Maker, told The Associated Press on Sunday.
He really was a fantastic writer. I still haven’t had the guts to get through the 1’000+ page Infinite Jest, but his essay collections are some of my favorite nonfiction, bar none.
There is one notable falsehood in AP’s report, though:
Asked what Wallace had been working on at the time of his death, [longtime editor Michael Pietsch] offered no specifics, but said: “He was always writing something. He was always doing something ambitious.”
I distinctly remember reading that Wallace was working on his next big piece of fiction (not short stories like Oblivion, but more like Infinite Jest). I know he probably has lots of unfinished writing that may eventually be edited and released, but this still sucks.
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All the Sad Young Literary Men - Publisher: Viking Adult
- Year: 2008
- Pages: 256
Stuff White People Like is the latest satirical meme sweeping the internet (well, the white people, anyway). I say this in part because I hope to make the new book part of my 52-in-52 meme, but also because it ties ever-so-neatly into my review of Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men. Because if you take the basic premise of SWPL—that is, upper-middle class intellectual whites form an incestuous subculture in which we all partake to some degree—and you turn it into a semi-serious pomo book by an upper-middle class intellectual white literary editor, you have All the Sad Literary Young Men.
Here’s my dilemma with the book: I’ll be the first one to delight in pomo literature, and self-referential jokes; I like books that bend the parallel threads of fiction and reality in until their curves finally touch. I get the inherent funniness of Gessen drawing these characters/caricatures which are simultaneously these brutally smart, educated men and also total disasters, personally and professionally. It’s a retooling of the “authenticity” argument of social conservatives—that is, painting pictures of theorists and ivory-tower academicians who are grossly out of step with the rest of the high-functioning planet.
What starts to bug me is that one of Gessen’s characters is Keith Gessen, and is likely about 98% based on the author, and 2% based on whimsy and plot expediency. Of the book’s three “overeducated” characters, Gessen is the one who actually succeeds, even if he doesn’t view it that way. Struggling Romantics, wannabe Zionists, thinly disguised versions of real-life persons (you can draw unequivocal lines to Noam Chomsky, among others): the book is pathetic to read.
It’s been too long since I had any Christopher Hitchens video love here. Here he is giving a speech based on his book about George Orwell.