Gatsby's trajectory

(dredged up from comment on defunct website, to one a little less defunct)

Sparks, or winks, and circular reasoning made elliptical—The Great Gatsby as orrery: Daisy coming from day’s-eye is a commonplace. But, as disaster comes from “bad star”, with the force of ill omen, the association of Gatsby with a comet (perhaps Wolf-Harrington? [initially known as Wolf]) is introduced early and reinforced often:

“... I realized by some unmistakable sign than an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon ...”

“... foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams ...”

“He literally glowed ...” at his nearest approach to Daisy.

“‘My house looks well, doesn’t it?’ he demanded. ‘See how the whole front of it catches the light.’”

Leaving Louisville: “The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desparately, as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.” (Note that not only is the track analagous to a comet’s path, but that ‘it sank lower’ ambiguously refers to the track as well as the sun. And of course there’s the ladder to the stars ...)

Gatsby’s progression amid the planetary system of other characters (and Nick’s observation of it) may be plotted (exercise left to the rereader).

Bob's yer uncle

 In honor of Bob Dylan's birthday, a couple of riffs off his stuff, excavated from the litforum archives:

King James Approximately
(Revised Standard Version)

When your pastor sends back all of your translations
And your Greek in Aramaic he exclaims
That you've misinterpreted all God's creations
Won't you come see me, King James?
Won't you come see me, King James?

Now when all denominations want back the words they lent you
And the thees and thine and thous go up in flames
And all parishoners start to resent you
Won't you come see me, King James?
Won't you come see me, King James?

Now when all the hacks that you have commissioned
Render all your verilys as all the sames
And you're sick of all this repetition
Won't you come see me, King James?
Won't you come see me, King James?

When all of your advisers cite Hebraic
Metered feet to convince you of their claims
Trying to prove that your conclusions are too archaic
Won't you come see me, King James?
Won't you come see me, King James?

Now when all the writers that you turned your other cheek to
All lay down terms in riders to cast blames
And you want somebody you don't have to speak to
Won't you come see me, King James?
Won't you come see me, King James?

and, with regard to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature:

They say my songs are dynamite
They give new meaning to the trite
No answer I can give too slight
A hand extends the bit to bite
With bated breath no nay despite
Lips sealed my ears are ringing

Sure is nice but the price
Out of my range don't think twice
It's alright, ma, I'm only singing

(which reminds me, that other Dylan, Thomas, in composing "Do not go gentle into that good night", did so without ever using the word fight)

best reading 2025

A bit down from last year, 9 books per month ... coupla cinderblox slowed me.

First off, there were the highly anticipated releases this year, foremost among them Christian Bök (see below), Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance Vol III (Joel Scott) [Duke], a fitting end to the trilogy, somehow timely, and Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket [Penguin], valedictory, similarly placed amongst his oeuvre as Look at the Harlequins! is in Nabokov's, self-parodic to some extent but also other-wise, all in all a fun ride (I'd rank squarely in the middle, cf biblioklept, who also compiled notes thereon) [BookMarks]. (Another fun ride was Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff's multi-meta e-pistolary Your Name Here [Dalkey], tho not up to this level.) The highly anticipated that fell short of its promise and premise was Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh (Max Lawton) [Deep Vellum], father-son dynamic amidst ekphrastic & exegetic excess from Reformation to now to Revelations; challenging read, anagram-mad, Andrei's notes & precis essential (would not have persevered otherwise), but hey, risks taken [BookMarks].

Then there are this year's releases that I didn't see coming:
Felix Nesi, People from Oetimu (Lara Norgaard) [archipelago]: historical group portrait on Timor border.
Antoine Volodine, The Inner Harbour (Gina M Stamm) [Minnesota]: gone to ground in transitioning Macau; late to US release; one of his better efforts, if atypical.
Wiesław Myśliwski, Needle's Eye (Bill Johnston) [archipelago]: age & youth, memory & mixed-taken identity, midlate20c smalltown Poland; up there with BTBA-winner Stone Upon Stone, and one of FT's 10 best translations of 2025.
and from late 2024:
Karl-Markus Gauß, In the Forest of Metropoles (Tess Lewis) [Seagull], essays on neglected Euro byways (geographical, ethnic, linguistic), excellent, tho last third falls off a bit.
Federico Falco, The Plains (Jennifer Croft) [Charco]: another rural retreat.

Catching up on what I'd missed from prior years, the best were
Ali Smith, Autumn [Anchor]
Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, Dayswork [WWNorton]
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop [Vintage]
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of the Stone City (John Hodgson) [Canongate]
Don DeLillo, Underworld [Scribner]
Mathias Énard, Street of Thieves (Charlotte Mandell) [Open Letter]
Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and other stories (Madeline Levine & Francine Prose) [Northwestern]
Béla Zsolt, Nine Suitcases (Ladislaus Löb) [Schocken]

And, while not among the best, still to be honorably mentioned:

Explored more Korean lit, beyond Han Kang and Bae Suah (though them too), uniformly good:
Han Kang, We Do Not Part (E. Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris) [Hogarth] up there with Human Acts but not quite, spectral ambiguities framing don't quite cohere with, tho lyric elements make up for [BookMarks]
Jang Eun-Jin, No One Writes Back (Jung Yewon) [Dalkey] picaresque random walking the dog [MAO]
Bae Suah, A Greater Music (Deborah Smith) [Open Letter] Korean's ambivalent return to Berlin; hasn't had int'l breakout like Han Kang but shoulda,best still first englishing, Nowhere to Be Found [M&L]
Ha Seong-nan, Wafers (Janet Hong) [Open Letter] more good shorts, fragmentary-multithreaded
Hwang Sok-Yong, The Guest (Kyung-Ja Chun & Maya West) [Seven Stories] Christianity and Communism clash, both as welcome as the plague; also, ghosts [MAO]
Kyung-Ran Jo, Blowfish (Chi-Young Kim) [Wildfire] artist and architect getting past family suicides [MAO]

Less poetry this year, all worthwhile, if for different reasons in each case:
Eliana Hernández-Pachón, The Brush (Robin Myers) [archipelago] poem around Columbian paramilitary massacre
The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084-1151) (Wendy Chen) [FSG] unsung Song poetess [MAO]
Christian Lehnert, Wickerwork (Richard Sieburth) [archipelago] nature-oriented poetry, sub species aeternitatis
Álvaro Mutis, Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems (Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, Alastair Reid) [nyrb] not merely pendant on the Adventures (tangled up in blue in print), impressive variety [MAO]
Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running (Karen Leeder) [Seagull] the last East German poet, Dresden, Rome, and elsewhere; Griffin 2025 winner
The Essential C.D. Wright (Forrest Gander & Michael Wiegers, eds) [Copper Canyon] sensitive selection of poetry 1976-2016 by longtime partner and editor
Christian Bök, The Xenotext: Book 2 [Coach House]: keenly anticipated, and did not disappoint; technically brilliant, long time in the making of something to outlast everything
Zhang Zao, Mirror (Fiona Sze-Lorrain) [Zephyr]: "3rd gen" Chinese poet, merging trad and western, wrapping up Zephyr's excellent Jintian series
TBR: Ada Limón, Startlement: New and Selected Poems [Milkweed] varied and a bit variable betwixt good and better

And to close, more solid archipelago book releases:
Elias Khoury, Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea (Humphrey Davies)
Halldór Laxness, The Great Weaver from Kashmir (Philip Roughton) [backlist] (but more Laxness coming, A Parish Chronicle)
José Eduardo Agualusa, The Living and the Rest (Daniel Hahn)
Gerbrand Bakker, The Hairdresser's Son (David Colmer)
Emmelie Prophète, Cécé (Aidan Rooney)

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 (though being restored at Shipwreck Library), 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 [update: apparently reconsidered]). (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:

(more polished examples at https://ambigr.am/hall-of-fame)

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]