litforum darkening

While neglecting the blog, I got more involved in the literature forum The Fictional Woods, an offshoot of the sadly defunct themodernword.com, both of which spotlight(ed) 6 of my top ten 20th century writers (plus Gabo). I'd participated in other such fora, all the way back to Usenet (rec.arts.books), through the NYTimes Book Forum and Readerville (Salon Table Talk exiles) prior to blogging, and the still extant World Literature Forum, but TFW better fit my proclivities, my contributions being assimilating noteworthy book / writer / publisher news, adding resources that might have been included in themodernword, and maintaining a log of my own reading. Primarily, it served my purpose of finding what to read next, moreso than blogs and literary journalism (save for The Complete Review; sorry to see The Modern Novel fold up its tent). (Oddly, what with my year's best coming up, others' such seldom so serve.)

Sadly, TFW is also winding down, the cadre of regular posters dwindling. Its inexorable decline began years ago, operating largely sans admin (no new blood), excluded from external search; no other venues attract (eg reddit's r/literature too diffuse). Despite that, it remains a resource for as long as it's up (unlike prior chats being wiped clean). Last time I was without a literature forum, I started this here blog, but that was back when blogs talked with each other (and not just in comments). It may be that the form is obsolete; it may just be that people don't talk with each other so much any more (ChatGPT?! one of my first blog entries was a LLM short story written mid-90s ...). Anyway, more reason to post here more. Stay tuned.

pluperfected

 the worst of times is always now

but then it passes; yesterday

was not so bad in retrospect

tomorrow might be better yet

if we can just get past today

AOXOMOXOA

conceived as flying disc hotstamp:

still here ...

So, 20 years ... granted, the last 5 have hardly been prolific, half being year-end posts on a year's worth of good reading (graciously linked by The Literary Saloon); the demise of the Best Translated Book Award accounts for some of the lack, though there's some promise of replacement by the indie-bookshop driven Cercador Prize. FWIW, I intend to increase posting frequency: more on that later.

While much of my reticence has been to avoid repeating myself, current circumstances (such as the cancellation of NEA grants) compel me to reiterate what I posted back in 2011, with updated linkage (linkrot why I don't link it directly):

Support Your Local Bookmaker

As the year goes into the home stretch, what remains but to remind you to remand a consideration for those who keep independent nonprofit literary publishing in the running? What's at stake is their continuing ability to get dark horses out of the gate: individual donors are important for direct funding, but I'd wager they also improve the odds for winning foundation support.

The publisher I put my money on is Archipelago Books [and joined their board the following year; I've read over 3/4 of their list, children's imprint Elsewhere excepted]. They've long been on a winning streak; the last time I broached this topic was appended to my take on one of their earlier successes, and its successors haven't let me down. With my abiding interest in literary translations, they have the inside track, and annual donation is my means of following the tip to "think global, act local". (And tax-deductibility isn't limited to offsetting gambling winnings.)

Of course, you may want to back a different entrant, or more than one, from the field below:
Archipelago Books
BOA Editions
Coffee House
Copper Canyon
Dalkey Archive now an imprint of:
Deep Vellum
Dzanc Books
Graywolf
Library of America
Milkweed
Open Letter
Restless Books
Sarabande Books
Transit
Two Lines
Ugly Duckling
White Pine
Zephyr

(or you could play the field with Words Without Borders but I think that's off-track betting.)

add 6.8.25: lithub on the future of small presses ...

2024 reading

As with last year, good reading, averaging 10 books per month, over an extended range ... highlights, 2024 releases marked with an asterisk:

For me, this year's biggest discovery was Vietnamese postwar literature, sparked by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện's Chronicles of a Village* (Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng) [Yale/Margellos], which led on to Duong Thu Huong (Novel without a Name, Paradise of the Blind), Bao Ninh (The Sorrow of War), and, from Curbstone Press' "Voices from Vietnam" series, shorts by Nguyen Huy Thiep and Ho Anh Thai; also but less so, the foundational early 19thc Nguyễn Du's The Song of Kiều.

Less from the rest of the east, but Hiromi Ito's The Thorn Puller deserves mention, and even moreso Keiichiro Hirano's Eclipse*.

Moving on to Eastern Europe, of course I made time for Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Herscht 07769*, which marked a return to form, but more rewarding were Magda Szabó (Katalin Street, The Door), Norman Manea (Captives, Exiled Shadow*), and Vera Mutafchieva (The Case of Cem*), and, in poetry, Ana Blandiana's Five Books. 

For South America, Charco Press offered Republic of Consciousness and Cercador Prize (new BTBA?) winner from Brazil, Ana Paula Maia's Of Cattle and Men, along with Argentina's Claudia Piñeiro (A Little Luck); otherwise, César Aira's Festival & Game of the Worlds* and Silvina Ocampo's posthumous The Promise; off-the-runs included Borges contemporaries Ángel Bonomini (The Novices of Lerna*) and Osvaldo Lamborghini (Two Stories).

*** (all 2024 releases) archipelago books had another banner year. Difficult to choose among, but stand-outs include Scholastique Mukasonga's Sister Deborah, Fine Gråbøl's What Kingdom, and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz's Great Fear on the Mountain (and I still have to get to Eliana Hernández-Pachón's The Brush and the lately lamented Elias Khoury's NBCC-longlister Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea). Adjacently, archipelago board members contributions were Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction and translator Tess Lewis with Lutz Seiler's Star 111 and Cécile Wajsbrot's Nevermore. ***

I spent some time on Nobelaureates that I'd neglected, but the best was alternate Nobel winner Maryse Condé's Segu.

Other noteworthy books:

Éric Chevillard, Museum Visits* (Daniel Levin Becker) [Yale/Margellos]

Ferit Edgü, The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales* (Aron Aji) [nyrb]

Erri De Luca, Impossible (N.S. Thompson) [Mountain Leopard]

Patrick Langley, The Variations* [nyrb]

Gabriel Josipovici, Infinity The Story of a Moment & Partita / A Winter in Zürau* [Carcanet]

Inka Parei, What Darkness Was (Katy Derbyshire) [Seagull]

Philippe Claudel, Brodeck (John Cullen) [Anchor]

and in poetry:

Tomasz Różycki, Colonies (Mira Rosenthal) [Zephyr]

Anne Carson, Wrong Norma* [NDP]

Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry* [Graywolf]

Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (Jenny Penburthy, ed) [California]

The above by no means exhausts what was worthwhile, the full rundown can be had at The Fictional Woods

 

Argentina canon

 To mark my 19th bloggiversary, I've compiled a list of what strikes me as essential prose readings from Argentina. Literarily, Argentina punches well above its weight; I've read as much of as the rest of Latin America combined (partly a function of what's been englished, but also of intrinsic interest). This does not include all of what I've read, or any of what I haven't (in-hand TBRs excepted).

The core (with Honorable Mentions for the annex below):

Jorge Luis Borges: from the 40s, the collections The Garden of Forking Paths, Artifices, & The Aleph (in Collected Fictions) (previously)

Adolpho Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel & Asleep in the Sun

Silvina Ocampo, Thus Were Their Faces TBR: The Promise (posthumous)

Ernesto Sabato, On Heroes and Tombs (HM The Tunnel)

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (HM: some of Blow-Up and other stories; Fantomas vs the Multinational Vampires)

Leopoldo Marechal, Adam Buenosayres (previously)

Roberto Arlt, Seven Madmen

Juan Filloy, Caterva (HM: Op Oloop) (recently elsewhere)

Ricardo Piglia, Artificial Respiration

Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman (on a par with other HM works)

Juan José Saer, La Grande (HM: The Witness, The Investigation, Scars)

César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, How I Became a Nun, & Varamo 

The annex: no depth without breadth, variety adds dimension; starting with the more familiar names

H. Bustos Domecq: lighter Borges & Bioy Casares collaborations eg Chronicles, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi

Norah Lange, People in the Room

Antonio di Benedetto, Zama (exceeded by some stories in Nest in the Bones, eg "Aballay"), The Silentiary

Rodrigo Fresán, The Invented Part so-so pomo but hey BTBA

Sergio Chejfec, The Planets

Andrés Neuman, Talking to Ourselves

on to the lesser known:

Haroldo Conti, Southeaster

Luis Sagasti, Fireflies & A Musical Offering

Carlos Gamerro, The Islands

Pedro Mairal, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

Federico Falco, A Perfect Cemetery

Hebe Uhart, The Scent of Buenos Aires

Sara Gallardo, January

Claudia Piñeiro, Elena Knows

Ariana Harwicz, Die, My Love

Selva Almada: The Wind that Lays Waste TBR: Not a River

Luisa Valenzuela, He Who Searches

Angélica Gorodischer, Jaguar's Tomb

Maria Gainza, Optic Nerve

Luis Chitarroni, The No Variations: Diary of an Unfinished Novel

and in the uncanny genre:

Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire

For all my reading, I've still probably only scratched the surface, the itch runs deeper ...

add 9.9: Samanta Schweblin weighs in with Read Your Way Through Buenos Aires [NYT arch]

2023 reading

A good year. Averaged 10 books per month. Tried widening my range, with uneven results, but worth it on the whole.

The writer I read the most (books not pages) was Esther Kinsky; my quick takes:
River (Iain Galbraith) [Fitzcarraldo]: wandering the marshy margins, interstitial residence (not Sebald esque but not possible without)
Grove (Caroline Schmidt) [Transit]: mourning sundry losses off-season in Italy
Rombo (Caroline Schmidt) [Fitzcarraldo]: NE Italy rocks! '76 earthquake before-and-aftermaths, through inhabitants' accounts
Cf NLR oeuvreview, TMN reviews

There were a number of writers who were worth doubling up on or back to:
Markus Werner, Zündel's Exit & Cold Shoulder both (Michael Hofmann) [Dalkey];
Gilbert Sorrentino, Blue Pastoral [Dalkey] & a reread of Mulligan Stew [Grove];
Hiromi Kawakami, People from My Neighborhood (Ted Goossen) [Soft Skull] & The Nakano Thrift Shop (Allison Markin Powell) [Europa] (cf below);
MAO favorite Amélie Nothomb, Loving Sabotage (Andrew Wilson) [NDP] & First Blood (Alison Anderson) [Europa];
the lately late lamented David Albahari, Bait (Peter Agnone) [Northwestern] & Checkpoint (Ellen Elias-Bursal) [Restless];
early Emmanuel Bove, My Friends (Janet Louth) [nyrb] & Armand (Janet Louth) [Marlboro/Northwestern];
and the latest Neustadt winner, Ananda Devi, poetry When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me (Kazim Ali) & prose Eve Out of Her Ruins (Jeffrey Zuckerman) both [Deep Vellum]

Short stories: Very good were T.C. Boyle's latest, I Walk between the Raindrops [ecco], Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro's The Word of the Speechless (Katherine Silver) [nyrb], and Yoko Ogawa's linked stories in Revenge (Stephen Snyder) [Picador]; more esoterically, Gabrielle Wittkop's Exemplary Departures (Annette David) [Wakefield]; less impressed by J.G. Ballard's best (also doubled, with The Drowned World), Yuri Herrera's Ten Planets (Lisa Dillman) [Graywolf] (a letdown after his fine trilogy of novellas) and José Eduardo Agualusa's A Practical Guide to Levitation (Daniel Hahn) [archipelago] (similarly, better as novelist); and deeply disappointed by Antonio Moresco's Clandestinity (Richard Dixon) [Deep Vellum] (overindulgent) and Géza Csáth's Opium (Jascha Keesler and Charlotte Rogers) [Europa]; but the standouts were Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny (Anton Hur) [Algonquin] (after the first couple indifferent stories) and Lucia Berlin's Evening in Paradise [Picador] (of which I was unaware, until I'd recommended A Manual for Cleaning Women to my godfather, whose library then forwarded the other to him and he counter-recommended to me).

Long stories: First, a couple excursions on specific themes ... not mentioned last year, I enjoyed Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night, which prompted me to follow up with other Japanese women writing on the margins: Hiroki Kawakami, as mentioned above, and Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station (Morgan Giles) [Riverhead]; adjacently, from other languages, Elisa Shua Dusapin's The Pachinko Parlor (Aneesa Abbas Higgins) [Open Letter], Jessica Au's Cold Enough for Snow [NDP], and, farther afield, Augusto Higa Oshiro's The Enlightenment of Katsuo Nagamatsu (Jennifer Shyue) [archipelago] and Thuân, Chinatown (Nguyễn An Lý) [NDP], all of which punch above their pagecount.

Another excursion was into interwar Russian émigré writing in Berlin and Paris, of interest to me because Nabokov; I have Bryan Karetnyk to thank for his translations of Gaito Gazdanov's The Spectre of Alexander Wolf [Pushkin], Yuri Felsen's Deceit [Astra], and Boris Poplavsky's Homeward from Heaven [Columbia], though I'm uncertain about following up with Irina Odoevtseva's Isolde [Pushkin], not my samovar of tea ...

Then there was a tour of more current Czech literature (with a sidetrip into Nobelaureate Jaroslav Seifert's poems via Ewald Osers & George Gibian [Catbird]), in part since my favorite living Czech author, Michel Ajvaz, had his fourth englishing from Dalkey Archive in the form of Journey to the South (Andrew Oakland), and bolstered by winstondad's own excursion. The rest of the itinerary, all worthwhile:
Jáchym Topol, A Sensitive Person (Alex Zucker) [Yale/Margellos]
Tomáš Zmeškal, Love Letter in Cuneiform (Alex Zucker) [Yale/Margellos]
Daniela Hodrová, A Kingdom of Souls (Veronique Firkusny & Elena Sokol) [Jantar]
Bianca Bellová, The Lake (Alex Zucker) [Parthian]

Closer to home, my favorite press, archipelago books, had yet another stellar year (its 20th, celebrated over gala dinner in Vinegar Hill House), garnering recognition for Bachtyar Ali's The Last Pomegranate Tree (Kareem Abdulrahman), Cheon Myeong-kwan's Whale (Chi-Young Kim), and Maylis de Kerangal's Eastbound (Jessica Moore), one of the NYTimes Best 10 Books of 2023. As good as these were, they should be joined by the more substantial Hungarian Attila Bartis' The End (Judith Sollosy), which has flown under the critical radar (his Tranquility won the 2008 BTBA). I also backfilled with Ivailo Petrov's Wolf Hunt (Angela Rodel), one of a very few englished novels from Bulgarian (though another, Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter, won the International Booker this year, though I thought it weaker than his previous writings, and the shortlisted Whale more deserving).

Then there were the books I had long deferred (often due to availability) but that lived up to their promise:
Irmtraud Morgner, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura (Jeanette Clausen) [Nebraska]
Pascal Quignard, The Roving Shadows (Chris Turner) [Seagull]
Juan José Saer, The Investigation (Helen Lane) [Serpent's Tail] (superior to the much-lauded Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time [faber & faber])

Other formidable 2023 releases, with quick takes:
Jen Craig, Wall [Zerogram]: Bernhardian artistic neurotic cringey evasive maneuvers (US ed blurbed by Emily Hall, The Longcut similar not congruent)
Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma (Katrina Dodson) [NDP]: wide-ranging syncretic (indige/afric/euro) fable newly translated with extensive underlying sourcing
Miquel de Palol, The Garden of Seven Twilights (Adrian Nathan West) [Dalkey]: elite intrigue in palatial retreat from nuclear holocaust
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret History of Men (Lara Vergnaud) [Other]: hybrid of The Savage Detectives (from which epigraph, title) and Yambo Ouologuem (whose Bound to Violence has been reissued in tandem)

and I had some catching up to do with untranslated works:
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker [Indiana]: long-post-apocalyptic English coming-and-going-of-age
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai [NDP]: held off on too long, both more and less than the hype which nonetheless justified
Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus [Penguin]: fine, rightly lauded, but the Christian & Grace episodes read like appendices
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont [Virago]: very good and/but very English (not to gainsay, but I prefer the sharper subtlety of say Penelope Fitzgerald or Kingsley Amis ...)

Poetry: a score of books, most good, some excellent, half of which translated; I shan't rattle off names, merely call attention to what took me most by surprise: I usually assiduously avoid anthologies, but Copper Canyon marked its 50th anniversary with two retrospective collections (found at the Brooklyn Book Festival) highlighting the best of their prodigious output:
A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry (Michael Wiegers, ed): anthology from premier publisher a must for surveying the contemporary poetry landscape, damn there's a lot of good poets whose best stand up to anyone's, but more uneven in 2nd half from 2010 on
Come Shining: More Poems and Stories from Fifty Years at Copper Canyon Press (Michael Wiegers and Kaci X. Tavares, ed): supplement to A House Called Tomorrow (prior comments pertain), ~15% testimonials to poems chosen for both volumes
(in addition, they also released dancing with the devil: the essential red pine translations: translatravelogue thru China a millennium or two or so ago)

Nonfiction: aside from a bit of philosophy, just writers who I've followed online for years:
M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir [Serpent's Tail]: the unexpected, as one (more or less) would expect (website)
Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World [Scribner]: (aka dsquared) a Cooks (the books) tour of malfeasance, a taxonomy of methods (of interest to me not only in finance but in analogy to literary hoaxing) (website)
George Scialabba, Only a Voice: essays [Verso]: modernity vs tradition, good selection spanning nearly 40 yrs (website)

And that's a wrap.

rereading

I rarely reread fiction. Not that I get everything out of it on the first pass, attentive though I may be, but subsequent passes extract little more of substance, less than I can get from new material. Often not the fault of the book, rather of my obtuseness as to what's in it, no less marked in the second go-round.

Over the past decade, the only fictions I've reread are Tristram Shandy, vol I of Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance (in prep for vol II), and, recently, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (prompted by the impending 3% Two-Month Review podcasts, though I may not tune in. Much.), and Hemingway short stories. Also, new translations of Calvino's Cosmicomics, two Musil novellas, Kafka shorts, and Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk, though that shouldn't count as a reread as such.

The blog bears testimony to fruit borne of prior rereadings: Borges, Poe, and especially Nabokov (who insisted rereading was the only reading), the most reread being Pale Fire, my favorite book. But any correlation between frequencies of blogging and rereading is coincidence, not causation. Most of my rereading preceded blogging anyway, much of it self-motivated, some related to literary forum group reads (in which obtuseness could be ameliorated by other perspectives, or simply by finding something new to say) (esp the late lamented NYTimes Book Forum) (and yes some overlap between).

So, my Bookshelf of Good Intentions currently includes a number of rereads I hope to address in the not too distant future (but then I was saying that 15 years back*):
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, last encountered in college, but I wanted to get through the rest of his work before returning to (well, except for Israel Potter and Clarel, and I still haven't gotten to Billy Budd) (and rereading The Confidence-Man, a better candidate for the Great American Novel, rerewarded).
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, so underappreciated you'd think there was a conspiracy or something.
Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (prior rereadings were The Crying of Lot 49 & Gravity's Rainbow), and maybe Against the Day down the road.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions ...  

* finally cleared Geroge Eliot's Daniel Deronda off that list

jussayin

 they say that the best things in life are free
but they'll kill you on the accessories
they say that actions speak louder than words
but words do more than they say

(and the journey is the destination

but you can't get there from here)