I conducted this Nathan Englander interview for the Spring 2008 issue of the Southern California Review, and I’m posting it online now for easier accessibility. If you want the entire text, click the title above or the link at the bottom of this post. Nathan Englander burst onto the literary scene in 1999, when he […]
The New York Times has a great article on an exhibition at the New York Public Library about Yaddo, the artist retreat outside Saratoga Springs in New York. As can be expected whenever Yaddo is discussed, the article veers into the social dimension: John Cheever used to boast that he had enjoyed sex on every […]
In light of the recent meltdown of the financial sector, and with the specter of a global recession looming over our spending habits, it’s an excellent time to examine how the fallout will affect the literary world. There’s been a few articles on this, including this one, “Will Books Be Immune to Global Recession?” Eric […]
Columbia College Chicago has put together a database of literary journal information. It gives you a snapshot of the type of fiction/poetry published in each journal, with currently more than fifty journals listed. While Duotrope‘s best information is statistic based — how many submissions a journal receives and how quickly they reject/accept — and the […]
Bookninja has a conversation between three critics on The Savage Detectives. BOMB magazine has an interview with Roberto Bolano, conducted through email back in 2001. The Nation has a personal story about poetic skirmishes during the time of Bolano. Biography and analysis of his major works at the New York Review of Books. Geometry of […]
Book One of 2666 — “The Part About the Critics” — introduces four literary critics obsessed with a reclusive author named Benno Von Archimboldi. Archimboldi is as autobiographically unknown as Pynchon, and as built up with legendary accomplishments as Kurtz. Each of the four critics are introduced by way of their introduction to Archimboldi, as […]
Bolano’s 2666 packs more names per square foot of text than a Pynchon novel. It’s especially dense in the fourth book of the novel, “The Part About the Crimes” as Bolano relates the stories of the mysterious murders of women in the Sonora desert of Mexico. These women are occasionally anonymous, but usually have names, […]
Everyone says Roberto Bolano’s 2666 is titled in a “mysterious” way. That’s a euphemism for not having any idea what it means. Part of the mystery is that 2666 never appears in any of the five sections of the novel. 2666 does, however, take on the form of a date, and by a date in […]
In the New York Times, Steven Millhauser recently wrote about the distinctions between the genre of the short story and the novel. These distinctions are very well classified, although Millhauser manages to infuse some fresh poetic verve into the discussion. But there’s just as much difference between the compact, 300 page novel and the loose […]
I’m going to devote the entire upcoming week to Roberto Bolano’s magnum opus 2666, which FSG publishes in November. Perhaps because of its size, I’m not going to do anything as comprehensive as a book review. Instead, I’ll be posting disparate thoughts on various sections of the novel, posts with more of a conversational bent. […]
