AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"This Insubstantial Pageant by Estha Weiner (review)","authors":"N. G. Haiduck","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a913426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a913426","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"48 1","pages":"116 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139345760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Interview with Matt Madden","authors":"Frederick Luis Aldama","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906493","url":null,"abstract":"An Interview with Matt Madden Frederick Luis Aldama Educator, curator, editor, translator—all-around polymath—Matt Madden is also one of the most formally innovative and inspiring of our contemporary comics storytellers. From his first comics, such as Black Candy (1998) and Odds Off (2001), his best-selling and multi-translated 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005) and his haiku comics to his latest Bridge (2021) and Ex Libris (2021), Madden brings an unparalleled precision of style and innovation to the comic storytelling arts. With every carefully inked line and panel configuration, he crafts stories that push the envelope on erstwhile thresholds of form and content. He awes his readers with his elevation of visual storytelling forms. He transports us into exquisite labyrinths of existential conundrums: truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence. Just as vanguardistas such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and more recently Giannini Braschi and Carmen María Machado are writer's writers, so too might we consider Madden a cartoonist's cartoonist, using the visual-verbal storytelling arts to create marvels of innovation and inspiration. His work challenges global comics creatives to up their game. We see in Madden's comics how his use of varied generative constraints leads to the crafting of stories that make new readers' perception, thought, and feeling about the known and enigmatic—the quotidian and transcendent. With Madden I think readily of Borges's \"The Aleph.\" Here Borges famously set himself the challenge of solving through fictional means the finite (human) encountering the infinite: how a human might perceive in a gestaltic instant everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously. Madden sets himself similarly seemingly impossible challenges that he not only solves through his dexterous visual-verbal storytelling expertise but does so in ways that lead to solutions to storytelling problems and the discovery of new storytelling techniques and forms. In addition to Madden's works already mentioned, he's also coauthor with [End Page 49] Jessica Abel of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (2008) and Mastering Comics (2012). From 2008 to 2013 he was series editor with Jessica Abel of The Best American Comics. His illustration work has appeared in WIRED, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. Madden's translations of comics include Aristophanes's The Zabîme Sisters (2010), Edmond Baudoin's Piero (2018), and Blutch's Mitchum (2020). Not surprisingly, Madden's work has caught the attention of many around the world. He's the US correspondent of the French Oubapo, a comics movement in France linked to the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group. Exhibitions of his work have appeared in the United States, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Madden has been invited to teach courses and workshops around the world, including in France, Switzerland, Denma","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ire Land (a Faery Tale) by Elisabeth Sheffield (review)","authors":"Jane Rosenberg LaForge","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906497","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Ire Land (a Faery Tale) by Elisabeth Sheffield Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) IRE LAND (A FAERY TALE) Elisabeth Sheffield Spuyten Duyvil https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/ire-land.html 188 pages; Print, $18.00 Call it dumbing down, appealing to the lowest common denominator, or Disneyfication. For generations of American children, the land of enchantment has long since been drained of its subtleties, as the traditions of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, among others, have been sanitized for a querulous mass market. In technicolor, these tales of transformation—from rags to riches, from man to mammal and back again, from fish woman to silenced female—become mere recollections of a moral education. The protagonist must learn a lesson of humility or selflessness to earn the psychic or fiscal reward that is their due. The narrator of Elisabeth Sheffield's new novel, Ire Land (a Faery Tale), confronts this lack of nuance head-on during a ménage à trois in an Upstate New York hotel room. Having adjourned to the \"woodland paradise\" suite after a conference, the women's studies professor Sandra Dorn and her sex partners of the moment find themselves haunted by this essentially American reinvention: \"Maybe there was something provoking about that wallpaper with its Disneyfied forest scene, as if there cartoon critters peering through the trees,\" she says while divining what inspired the \"antic play of moist cavities and thrusting appendages\" that lasted for three days, until the waterbed broke. [End Page 72] Despite the fervency of her efforts, Dorn fails on this occasion, and others, to restore what has been lost by the homogenization of earthy folklore into an industry exercising a fraught cultural dominance. Whether she ever gets beyond the forces arrayed against her, or if the price she pays trying is too steep, will likely make for a diverting discussion on how any human being, particularly a woman of a certain age, can make meaning out of their life in the postmodern era. In the meantime, Sheffield delivers a frequently hilarious and finally heartbreaking dive into contested spaces in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Much of this romp, which begins in western Colorado, jumps to New York City and parts north, and crosses back and forth into the (now) far reaches of the British Empire, centers on the female body—how it looks, or should look; who controls it, and for what purpose—but to reduce Ire Land to a story about gender is to ignore its fundamental criticism of the so-called binary world and the vicious divisions we struggle through in its wake. Though Dorn is ostensibly the novel's narrator and protagonist, Ire Land is an epistolary novel, the leavings of a daughter of Irish immigrants who has become unhoused, and possibly unhinged, as she records her final metamorphosis. She recalls beginning her adult life as a \"big ripe pimple of potential\" and is alternately referred to as a \"hag,\" a \"cutting edge bitch,\" a","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"175 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capricorn, Venus Descendant: 50 Poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros by Michael Joyce, and: Light in Its Common Place by Michael Joyce (review)","authors":"Daniel T. O'Hara","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906510","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Capricorn, Venus Descendant: 50 Poems of Pandemos, Karkinos, & Eros by Michael Joyce, and: Light in Its Common Place by Michael Joyce Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) CAPRICORN, VENUS DESCENDANT: 50 POEMS OF PANDEMOS, KARKINOS, & EROS Michael Joyce Broadstone Books https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/capricorn-venus-descendant-50-poems-of-pandemos-karkinos-eros 64 pages; Print, $22.50 LIGHT IN ITS COMMON PLACE Michael Joyce Broadstone Books https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/light-in-its-common-place-poems-by-michael-joyce 96 pages; Print, $22.50 In recent psychoanalytic theory, when revisiting Freud's later speculations on the death drive, the idea of unbinding the tangled bundles of erotic and destructive, even self-destructive impulses (and their memories and fantasies), is a way of talking about what happens in the cases of patients who succumb to their suicidal compulsions. When untangled by analysis, unbound by it, unless there is an object readily available toward which those destructive (or erotic) feelings can be directed, they turn immediately around on the self, with, in the former cases, too often tragic results. Imagine, if you will, the famous fort/da game invented by Freud's grandson Ernst for the times when his mother, Sophia, leaves him alone. Ernst in his crib ties a string to a toy and throws it over the side and reels it back in, saying as he does so what sounds like fort (there) and da (here). For a poet, disinvestment, unbinding impulses of an erotic or a destructive kind, can be a dangerous, delicate process. This is not to claim that Ernst ties the string [End Page 128] around his neck, changes the toy at its end to a heavy weight, and hangs himself in his crib, rather than suffer the periodic losses of his mother's presence. But as Olivia Laing, in The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2013), outlines it usefully in her chapter on John Berryman, his disinvestment in his parents, especially his father, informs and shapes his alcoholism definitively throughout his life, sacrificing himself even as his poetry rises to major status, especially in his personal epic, The Dream Songs (1969). Rossella Valdre's Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Freudian Death Drive: In Theory, the Clinic, and Art (2019) is the best guide to this recent theoretic development, which I single out as I find it most useful in reading the poems in Michael Joyce's both important and subtly disturbing volumes. Two poems, one from each of these volumes, can exemplify what I mean. \"North Wildwood\" is the first poem, from Light in Its Common Place. It adopts the commonplace tone of this volume, and its run-on syntax is typical of Joyce as it paints a beach scene at two a.m. of three brothers observing \"a lone crane,\" feeding \"amidst lapping waves,\" as \"false dawn traces a horizon beyond the blackness.\" The brothers, as they move along the boardwalk under the \"bright wand\" of the lighthouse, fall silent and disturb two lovers who are whi","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Morning Line: A Writer's Odds","authors":"Jay Neugeboren","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906486","url":null,"abstract":"The Morning LineA Writer's Odds Jay Neugeboren (bio) By the time I was twenty-four years old, when I sold my first short story to the now defunct Colorado Review for ten dollars, I had accumulated, by my count, 576 rejections. I had also written seven unpublished novels. One cold winter morning, about six months before I received the good news from Colorado Review, and after a particularly disheartening series of rejections, I decided to wallpaper my one-room flat in Bloomington, Indiana, with my rejection slips. I read through them and sorted them out—the form letters to one side, the personal notes to the other—and arranged the slips and letters in stacks by size and color, after which I began taping and stapling them to the wall directly above my desk. In some perverse way, I believed these pieces of paper would prove to me that I was what I doubted most of all: a real writer. I would create a dazzling, ingeniously quilted patchwork made up of the words of those who were resisting me, and by having their words in front of me while I was writing, I would do them battle. I'll show the bastards! I screamed silently. I'll show them by writing stories and novels whose brilliance and power will be undeniable, and someday, when my work is published and praised, and these same editors, publishers, and magazines come around to solicit my fiction . . . To my surprise—I was, as ever, at least as naive as I was persistent—it took less than an hour of taping and stapling before I found myself falling into the blackest of depressions. I took all the rejection slips down and put them in the bottom drawer of my desk, and I brooded on my nonexistent literary career: I would never be published, and—an inevitable consequence—I would never be happy again. I did not, however, take down two sheets of paper that had been on the wall before my antic impulse took over—one that contained a quote by George Gissing I read each morning to encourage me to stay the course, and one on which, to keep track of submissions, I listed where my various books, stories, and articles were, and when I had sent them out. Then, one morning not long after I'd gotten out of the wallpapering business, when I was typing up a fresh list of what I had out on submission, and [End Page 18] after I'd typed the title of my most recently completed novel, the name of the publisher I'd sent it to, and the date on which I'd sent it out, I hit the tab key, let the cartridge slide to the left, and typed in odds—9,999 to 1. Then I typed in odds for each item, and when I got to the bottom of the page, under the column in which I'd posted odds, I listed a Best Bet, Long Shot, Hopeful, Sleeper, and Daily Double. To the left of these selections, in order to keep a running score of how my work was faring in the world, I typed in the words \"THEM\" vs. \"US.\" I've kept a scoreboard on a wall near my desk for the sixty years that have passed since then, and though the odds can fluctuate wildly from day to day, de","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Carrying on in Cuneiform: An Interview with Kyle Schlesinger","authors":"Charles Alexander","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906517","url":null,"abstract":"Carrying on in CuneiformAn Interview with Kyle Schlesinger Charles Alexander (bio) In previous columns I have explored some past practitioners of poetry and the printing and publishing arts, and wanted, now, to turn attention to some things happening at present, among printers, poets, and bookmakers, beginning with the profoundly thoughtful and innovative practice of the proprietor of Cuneiform Press, Kyle Schlesinger. Schlesinger has worked with poets and artists including Jim Dine, Gil Ott, Alistair Johnston, Trevor Winkfield, Ron Padgett, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Rogal, and many more. By \"has worked with\" I mean a range of practices, but mostly pushing toward, and often becoming, full collaborations. In his poetry, too, he has tended to collaborate with others, though his individual volumes, such as A New Kind of Country (Chax 2022), show his decidedly individual, independent, and bold practices in the arts of the word. His version/vision of the arts (and life) embodies uncertainty and poses questions. The last stanza of the title poem reads: Motion as a verbSound not a wordLike wild jasmineA long way hereWhich way is AmericaSound not a wordWhich way is America I posted a set of questions to Schlesinger about his work and about inhabiting the roles of poet, printer, and publisher. Or, in truth, I sent these questions to him and asked him to simply \"hang out\" in their spaces, and while doing so, write something in response. He did that, and more. Here are those questions and his responses. [End Page 158] 1. Metal, paper, ink—what do these elements have to do with your work, and with how you think about printing? Do they creep into your poetry, too? Metal, paper, and ink are the bedrock of civilization as we know it. Without the printing press, literacy would still be a privilege of the aristocracy alone. It is easy to forget that just a few hundred years ago a book was a rare, valuable, mysterious object. As a reader, writer, and printer, I am grateful to be a small part of that glorious tradition. Of course I've never been one to adhere to any particular purist lineage, nor am I interested in period pieces per se, but there is a reverence for words, materials, and their construction ingrained in me. As a poet I have an insatiable curiosity about the materials of writing, the embodiment of ideas. I'm interested in the tools poets used, artifacts and artifice. As a scholar, I need history to anchor literary theory, \"no ideas but in things,\" like Williams said. The practice of typography taught me an economy of language in my poems, which I get from Creeley and Dickinson as well. When I read a poem, I want to know all about the poet, printer, papermaker, artist, typographer, publisher, et cetera, to see the book as a unique form of collaboration, a sum far greater than a disembodied text. 2. I think you are self-taught as a printer/bookmaker. Is that true? Can you talk about your beginnings? What sparked you? What did you have in mind? What surprise","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Atlantis, an Autoanthropology by Nathaniel Tarn (review)","authors":"Norman Fischer","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906506","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Atlantis, an Autoanthropology by Nathaniel Tarn Norman Fischer (bio) ATLANTIS, AN AUTOANTHROPOLOGY Nathaniel Tarn Duke University Press https://www.dukeupress.edu/atlantis-an-autoanthropology 344 pages; Print, $25.95 Wikipedia tells me this about \"anthropology\": Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. Nathaniel Tarn is an anthropologist who is and has always been a poet. The facts of his biography make him an exemplary subject for anthropological study. He was born in France in 1928 to parents whose Jewish roots were Lithuanian and Ukrainian. The family moved to Belgium and then to England during World War II, where Tarn was educated and began his early writing. In 1970 he immigrated to United States, where he became a post-sixties American poet, active in the aesthetic movements of the period. All of which make him an unusual figure, spanning several cultures and time frames, from whose experience much can be learned. Still active at ninety-four, with two poetry titles published within the last few years, Tarn has been restlessly given to prodigious world travel. He has visited every continent, and lived for lengthy periods of time in Asia and Latin America, sites of his important anthropological work of the 1950s. All in all a rather astonishing life, and one whose recounting is bound to be of interest. Tarn's latest book, Atlantis, an Autoanthropology is such a recounting. As the title indicates, it proposes itself not as memoir or autobiography but rather [End Page 110] as a work of anthropology. And the ways in which the text, because of this, differs from memoir or autobiography are what make it particularly interesting. Tarn's intent, evidently, is not to tell us about himself, though he does do that: it's to study himself through the accumulation of data. While Tarn's book is honestly and intensely self-reflective, it is at the same time a rather exhaustive and even possibly objective recitation of the relevant facts in the cultural history of the times in which he has lived. Contemporary anthropologists understand that they can't feign objectivity—they must reveal who they are, their prejudices and biases, as context for their reportage. So for Tarn's study of Tarn, Tarn must reveal his character. He is, as he writes, a cranky arachnophobe, a childhood bed-wetter who grows up to develop an unusually loud voice, which, he tells us, he uses to demand of travel agents, bureaucrats, and hotel clerks services he ought to be getting and isn't. He is a person given to depression and possible bipolar syndrome, and may be subject to a bit of OCD. The child of overbearing bourgeois parents who insisted that he get a serious career in order to raise a fam","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"My Plate Is Full\": Rejection, a Memoir","authors":"Steve Tomasula","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906490","url":null,"abstract":"\"My Plate Is Full\"Rejection, a Memoir Steve Tomasula (bio) Rejection letters. Hoo boy!—I've had my share, especially when just starting out, writing experimental prose in a social-realist literary world, though just a couple years ago I think I may have set a record for the fastest rejection ever received: while most magazines have a reporting time of three to six months, a submission I'd sent via Submittable to a science fiction magazine (whose name I can't remember; more on this below) came back in like twenty minutes. (At that rate, working forty hours a week, and without writing another story, or making any simultaneous submissions, I could get rejected 6,240 times by year's end!) At first I thought the rejection must be some version of an automated \"my plate is full\" rejection email (more on this below). But no, it had clearly been read by the editor: she cited specific details from the story, even intimated that she knew that another story of mine had been in a Year's Best Sci-Fi anthology a couple of years ago. And for these reasons the rejection stung more than if she hadn't read it at all. Unlike a bot, this editor knew what she was rejecting. So I put this rejection in the genre of rejections described to me by a senior editor when I became an editor on a literary magazine and inherited a slush pile the size of Mount Everest: \"You don't have to drink the whole gallon to know the milk is bad.\" But my memories of rejection letters come mainly from the time when the business of publishing fiction was a paper affair, conducted at the pace of photocopiers, licking stamps, and stuffing envelopes in a paper economy that gave us terms like \"slush pile\" (for the piles of paper manuscripts that would accumulate in editorial offices all over the country); SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope, required to have your manuscript sent back to you, which everyone did because it was cheaper to have it returned to you so you could send it out to another magazine than it was to make a new copy); \"over the transom\" (i.e., unsolicited), and other words that have persisted into the digital age like an evolutionary hangover. And instead of a sci-fi, lightning strike of a rejection like I received last year, my memories are mainly from those paper days when, like dull, winter rain, rejections fell from agents, publishers, literary magazines, even from charitable organizations looking for organ [End Page 35] donors. Or so it seemed. Through it all, I tried to have in mind stories of other aspiring authors and how they dealt with rejection. Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (1979) includes as a preface the forty rejection letters the novel received before Grove Press Picked it up (yay!—a happy outcome!). You can see the list of fifty-four rejections David Markson's classic Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) received here: https://biblioklept.org/2012/01/31/list-of-rejections-of-wittgensteins-mistress-david-markson/. The stories of these authors are not exceptional.","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Literate Journey","authors":"John Tytell","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906491","url":null,"abstract":"A Literate Journey John Tytell (bio) . . . a plenipotentiary from the realm of free spirits. —Tropic of Cancer The worst professional possibility for a writer is the news that your work has been rejected again. Related to that, I suppose, is the discovery, sometimes months after the fact, that your previous book has disappeared from a publisher's list, still available, perhaps, used on Amazon for a pittance, or even found with the occasional coffee stain in a public library. In more gallant times, publishers would remainder such titles and offer their authors an early opportunity to purchase copies at a greatly reduced rate. Henry David Thoreau once boasted that he had a library of a thousand books, nine hundred and ninety-eight of which he had written himself. His book Walden (1854), it needs no explaining, is one of the classics of our literature. In my attic in Vermont, I have hoarded a similar supply of books I have written, each disowned title stacked in boxes to the eaves like so much ballast in a ship's hold. The marauding mice and the more destructive red-tailed squirrels, which eat clothing and most anything else, have not yet resorted to this obscure library. Perhaps my private stash for posterity doesn't taste as good as the holy argyle of last winter, or maybe it lacks sufficient nourishment, or is my subject matter a literature too refined for country tastes? Today, short-staffed publishers may not even inform the writer that they no longer wish to represent your work or even store it in warehouses which they can no longer afford. If the public library, then, becomes the cemetery for old books, my attic is a private burial ground, the weight of all those words an anchor in the winter winds. Contemporary writers may have the grim satisfaction of seeing copies of their books in electronic versions blinking into an uncertain future, though such a possibility may seem more spectral and less substantive than seeing your book displayed in a bookstore window. For the writer, the death of a [End Page 39] book is an ultimate rejection, akin to what a parent must feel after a divorce or when a child dies first. I realize that the child's death is inconsolable. In the writer's case, the void may be filled with a new project. The writer may be more prepared, the death of the book more expected so less shocking, but the loss may still be profound. The deceased child's memory remains in the heart while the lost book may resonate more in the mind, but both losses have metaphysical connections to the soul. Over the years, the taboo nature of my subjects—writers who quarreled violently with established values—has subjected me to the pressures of editorial qualms whose anxious hermeneutics signal that cultural nerves meant to be hidden are being exposed. Allow me to offer two examples. In the winter of 1987, Nona Balakian, an editor with The New York Times Book Review, asked me to review The Last Museum (1986), a novel written by a visual artist named","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In Search of Synergy","authors":"E. Ethelbert Miller","doi":"10.1353/abr.2023.a906503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/abr.2023.a906503","url":null,"abstract":"In Search of Synergy E. Ethelbert Miller (bio) Literary anthologies are graveyards. In 1975 I coedited Synergy: An Anthology of D.C. Black Poetry, with Ahmos Zu-Bolton. I had met Ahmos the year before. He was working at a community center in Maryland and editing Hoo-Doo, a small press magazine. When Ahmos arrived on the campus of Howard University I knew his name because he had rejected poems that I submitted to his journal. He wrote a rejection note saying \"this is not Hoo-Doo poetry.\" I was twenty-four and had recently graduated from Howard with a degree in African American studies, but my knowledge of the folklore of Black people was limited. Dressed in what I would quickly learn was his signature coveralls, Ahmos looked like he was a member of SNCC doing voter registration in the Deep South. He reminded me more of a civil rights worker than an editor. It was Ahmos who slipped me \"medication\" that helped reduce my Black Nationalist fever. Like a trickster or someone simply mysterious, Ahmos knew the art of writing grants and had mastered the skill of getting what some Afro-headed folks called white money. We were still living in the shadows of the sixties. My head was filled with quotes and slogans. I was an Eric Hoffer, true believer. I was a young writer learning the ropes. Ahmos taught me how to jab, bob, and weave. He taught me form and technique. I soon began to move around the ring of the literary world. Along with publishing a magazine, Ahmos was also interested in giving birth to books. He was always in need of a midwife for his ideas. One idea was to publish the first anthology of poetry written by D.C. Black poets. It was not a difficult task since I had started my Ascension Poetry Reading Series in April 1974. I knew many of the Black poets in the city. The most prominent were Sterling A. Brown, Owen Dodson, May Miller, and Dolores Kendrick. The actual idea for the anthology came from across the \"tracks,\" as Ahmos would write in his introduction: This project was started in the spring of 1974—it was to be published by Some of Us Press (SOUP) from the other side of the tracks. However, [End Page 96] after I had asked my friend E. Ethelbert Miller to join me in the project (and we spent a couple of hectic weeks calling poets), SOUP decided that this wasn't what they had in mind. From that point the struggle was about funds. At one point we even considered a massive co-op involving all the poets in the anthology (that was suggested by Dudley Randall of Broadside Press, who was born in this city). Now, almost fifty years later, I pick up a copy of Synergy. The anthology came with a hole in the cover, another example of Ahmos being avant-garde or just a tad different from everything I ever imagined doing. There are too many voices that are silent now. Many left this world too soon either by sickness or even suicide. Why do I feel like an undertaker and not an editor? My memory brings flowers for Gaston Neal, Otis Williams, Winston Napier","PeriodicalId":41337,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW","volume":"256 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}