Annotated list of literary blogs which regularly feature longform content.
Categories:
Science Fiction
Contrary Brin by author David Brin. Weekly. Mostly ruminations about science and topics raised in his own books.
Nerds of a Feather is a recognized scifi groupblog/fanzine with book reviews, interviews and lots of coverage of Sci-Fi Awards. (BTW, really impressive contributor list). Since 2012. Their main book review index is 5 years out of date,
Ancillary Review of Books runs book reviews, essays and interviews about speculative topics. Since. 8 book reviews/essays per month. Since 2020. “ARB is edited by academics and alt-acs, folks who have grown increasingly skeptical of universities and academic writing alone as a place for political change.” Since 2024 Jake Casella Brookins runs its podcast Meal of Thorns podcast
William J. Cobb contains movie reviews, book reviews, excursion reports, politics and even occasional short stories. 2x weekly. Since 2009.
Woman of Letters by Naomi Kanaka publishes distinguished longform essays and book reviews about classic and contemporary fiction. She also has written several books. 2x a week.
Empire Chronicles by Anis Shivani. Shivani is a Texas-based radical poet who write longform essays about culture and literature mixed with a heavy dose of politics. 2x a week since 2024.
Mainly Book Reviews
Ron Charles. Laid-off Wash Post book critics posts reviews on Substack. 3x a week since 2025(?)
Complete Review /Literary Saloon. Posts & Reviews by M.A. Orthofer about non-USA fiction and translated fiction and blogs about international prizes. 4x weekly. Here’s the Review Index. Also summarizes third party book reviews (English and non-English) Since 2002.
Better Living through Beowulf by Robin Bates. Retired English prof still posts essays and book reviews, mostly about classics. 3x a week since 2009.
Neglected Books. By Brad Bigelow. Reviews of many unknown books, plus tons of book lists from print journals and books. Indispensable. 1x weekly. Since 2006.
Daniel Green has been writing long form criticism about books, literature and culture, with a special emphasis on experimental fiction. In addition to writing stuff for the Reading Experience blog and Unbeaten Paths (substack), he writes a one man book review called Unbeaten Paths (12 volumes as of Oct 2026). Posts maybe 1x every 1 or 2 months since 2004 , but what he posts is long and thorough.
Laura Miller is a longtime book/movie critic (W) who co-founded Salon.com and is a book/culture columnist for Slate (and one of my personal faves). Although she regularly racks up lots of reviews, her pieces are more like “literary journalism” or features. She is really really good at spotting trends and writing readable analyses. The best way to track her pieces are through Bluesky although in the past few years she has been publishing regularly at Slate and a vast archive of her articles are on salon.com
Rohan Amanda Maitzen is a Canadian professor & critic who posts book reviews and literary essays and personal stuff 3x a month on Novel Readings. She posts a lot about Victorian fiction, has no index but a Best of Novel Readings. She also was the senior editor for Open Letters Monthly, (2007-2017) which as wonderful as it was, I learned about just a year before it stopped publishing.
Zachary Gillan is a critic of weird fiction who writes longish reviews and essays for Ancillary ROB, LAROB and other places. He has been covering lots of literary ground i didn’t even know existed! Since 2012.
Defunct (or Hibernating)
Jake Seliger‘s The Story’s Story was an Arizona-based litblogger with a Phd in English. (I wrote a posthumous appreciation and am in the middle of a Best of Jake’s blog post.).
D.G. Myers(1952-2014) was a critic and literary historian who taught at Texas A&M and Ohio State.
Critical Notes is an email newsletter consisting of essays and reviews by National Book Critics Circle members. Sent every 2 weeks. Very distinguished, but I get frustrated at how many links are behind paywalls or print-only journals.
[Note: I have disabled comments here, but if you want to write me to recommend other litblogs or recommend your own, feel free. Either send me an email idiotprogrammer AT fastmailbox.net or make a blog comment on one of my other blogposts. (I don’t always approve them, but I certainly read them].
As strange as this sounds, literary bloggers are becoming a dying breed (and sometimes they are even dying!) Sure, authors and bloggers are made of the same stuff, and most authors manage to write a few blogposts for their book sites. But let’s face it. Writers in academia don’t have time to post on blogs; real authors often don’t have time to write online pieces for nonexistent audiences unless they already have found an audience.
I created this list mainly for my own reference. Believe it or not, I often “misplace” cool bloggers/writers only to remember them years (or even decades) later. Yes, it’s a pain in the neck to keep up to date, but I’m sure going to try.
As someone who has been blogging off and on since 2000, I have seen great bloggers go from posting daily to posting rarely or never. Hey, that’s just what happens. During some periods, life and other projects have a habit of getting in the way. Often people land on litblogs only because someone was seeking information about an individual author or book. That’s fine, but I wish that litbloggers would keep an index of books and authors which they have reviewed.
(Rant) Many of these blogs have review policies that say they will not review self-published or indie books. Really, I don’t understand this animus against self-published books. Books are books, and it doesn’t matter where they come from. The main difference between indie and trad books is simply the size of the publicity budgets.
Texas author Clay Reynolds was a literary giant who understood deeply what it meant to be a Texan. He was a great scholar of history and literature and also a dedicated teacher. His novels tackled all kinds of social issues of today and yesterday; they were populated with characters who could be lovely, offbeat or even detestable. But he could also find sympathetic and even heroic qualities in the most ordinary of people (such as with the Gil Hooley character in his novel Tentmaker). Reynolds pursued his art both brilliantly and relentlessly — and with humor and compassion. Reynold’s Texas stories reveal the complexity of character and the worlds they inhabited; these stories will be treasured for generations.
By Robert Nagle, Blogger and Editor of Personville Press
At the end of this page is a list of the best Clay Reynolds books & essays to start off with. Several of Mr. Reynolds books were published as ebooks by Baen Books and are available on all major ebook stores. The official author page for Clay Reynolds contains lots of links to published essays and online articles. Several books (likeSandhill County Lines) are only available in print and can be bought on Amazon and other places. Sandhill County Lines is also an audiobook available on Audible and other places.
(Here is a 2017 reading Clay Reynolds gave where he tells a beautiful story about his father’s work as a railway man in a small Texas town).
I came to know author Clay Reynolds during his last year of life. No, I never met the man or even talked to him on the phone, but we corresponded often over the last year about literary matters. We shared a few common friends on Facebook, and several years ago, after I noticed that there was no Wikipedia page about him, I offered to set one up for him (as I had done before for several Texas authors). It took more than a year for Mr. Reynolds to respond — at first, he was a bit suspicious, but he opened up a bit after learning that my Personville Press was named after a small town outside Dallas. Reynolds loved to write about small towns in Texas like Quanah, Texas where he grew up.
As it turns out, Mr. Reynolds and I had many connections. Both of us passed through Trinity University (I had gotten my B.A. in 1988 and Reynolds had studied there as an undergraduate and received his master’s in 1974). By some miraculous coincidence, both of us took creative writing classes with playwright Eugene McKinney and were both ardent fans of the fiction of Robert Flynn (who taught fiction writing at Trinity and also used Texas as a backdrop for his fiction). As luck would have it, during the years I was at Trinity, Clay Reynolds had visited several times to give lectures about fiction — although strangely, I never knew about it at the time).
Actually though, my first contact with Clay Reynolds came through book reviews he regularly wrote for the Houston Chronicle. Unbeknownst to me at the time, after my mom saw one of Reynolds’ book reviews in 1996, she bought the book and mailed it to me during me Peace Corps service in Albania. (That book happened to be Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson and was delightful).
After Mr. Reynolds responded and I realized all the common connections, I suggested that in addition to writing the Wikipedia page article that I would like to interview him separately by email. Reynolds already had a long distinguished career in academia and publishing, and it was semi-scandalous that no Wikipedia page existed about him.
Lone Star Literary Life had already done an in-depth interview with Mr. Reynolds in 2016, but it was clear that many more topics remained to be covered — and besides, Reynolds was the perfect interview subject because he would eagerly answer any question thrown at him. Indeed, purely as a pastime, Reynolds had answered over 1300 questions on the Quora.com website about history, culture, Texas, you name it. My email interview with Reynolds started in mid-January 2021 and ended in January 2022. The interview itself is about 45,000 words and will be released online on one of my websites by Summer, 2022.
6 Interesting/Peculiar Things about Clay Reynolds
He was loquacious about his own literary creations and the creative process itself. Many authors are reluctant to engage so openly in this kind of introspection. Not Reynolds. When Baen republished his titles as ebooks, he wrote 2 new prefaces — (one for Vox Populi, and one for Tentmaker — you can read them by clicking the Sample button on the book page to read it in a browser). Reynolds wrote a similar kind of preface essay for his Sandhill County Lines short story collection. He delivered an address about creativity and biography called “A Cow Can Moo” (PDF) . You get the point.
Reynolds had an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and history. (He actually received his undergraduate degree in history and wrote his doctorate on literary history (American Social Drama in the 1930s). Just for the hell of it, during his retirement he liked to answer random questions about history on Quora.com He answered 1300 questions (with his last answer about the price of horses in the USA just before the advent of the car). He rarely asked questions on quora.com except one –what was the asking price for the street price of raw opium in 1916? (now that he asked it, I am kind of curious about the answer!)
Reynolds had a knack for writing about people with rough edges. Critic John Pitchfork remarked that one of the best features of Reynolds fiction is “the recurrent pattern of tongue-tied and not very bright good old Texas boys courting the mystery of beauty they cannot understand nor resist.” Sandhill County Lines has tough rednecks (“A better class of people”), vulgar frat boys (Mexico), domineering parents (“The Prodigal”). (Don’t worry, it also has lots of kind-hearted people as well). One of my fave stories is “Nickelby” about an adjunct English professor who moves next door to a mean-tempered man who mistreats his dog and how her desire to protect the dog forces a confrontation. Tentmaker is populated with outlaws, prostitutes and all sorts of misfits.
Reynolds was a stickler about historical accuracy in his old Western novels. He spent about 2 years researching the 1992 novel Franklin’s Crossing and did all kinds of field research to learn about dress, weapons, transportation. He visited the archives of a Tennessee hotel to learn what kinds of dinner they served. In the BAEN interview, he said he assumed that everybody ate steak in the 1870s only to find out that almost nobody could eat beef because it couldn’t be preserved (in contrast to fish, pork, fowl, which could be). He had no idea how big wagons were during that time (and how much they could hold) or how to use a saddle with a 19th century tack. This research also shows in his later novel, Tentmaker. (2002)
6 Clay Reynolds works to start off with
Clay Reynolds has written a ton of stuff. I have read only a fraction of them, but I sorta know what most of them are about. There’s enough to keep a bookworm busy for years (if not decades). Here’s some tips about how to get started. You can buy DRM-free ebooks of these titles directly at the baen.com website and print copies and also buy them at the same price on Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Don’t be fooled by the lack of customer reviews of these books on Amazon. All are interesting and dramatic and beautiful.
1. Of Snakes & sex & Playing in the Rain: Random Thoughts on Harmful Things (Baen 2013) This is a great and funny and poetic collection of personal essays about all sorts of topics ranging from “macho” topics (like trout fishing, golf, baseball, etc) to pop culture (Elvis, first dates, coffee, warning labels) to personal reflections about the legacy of long lost relatives. This is the perfect gift book for the I-Know-How-To-Read-But-I’d-never-be-caught-dead-reading-Proust-or-Faulkner-or-Morrison type of reader.
2. The Vigil (1986) was his widely acclaimed first novel. It’s about a mother who loses her daughter in a Texas town. It received very positive reviews in the national press.
3. Tentmaker (2012) is a historic novel about Gil Hooley, an ordinary fellow who travels to Texas in the late 19th century after his wife leaves him. He is (you guessed it) a tentmaker. After his wagon breaks down in the middle of nowhere, he decides to live in his tent. The novel is about the society which forms around him — including a brothel! — and how this emerging group tries to fend off various outlaws and calamities. The first chapter begins with a shocking and gruesome crime, and the rest of the novel alternates between the perspective of the outlaws and the various people trying to make a living around Hooley’s tent city. This novel was meticulously researched, has a lot of bawdy humor and does a great job of conjuring up what early settlements were like before they turned into actual towns. I love this book; as I said, the first few chapters are pretty gruesome, but it heads off into many unexpected directions.
4. Sandhill County Lines (Stories)2007 (No Ebook) If you can, try to listen to this audio book instead of reading it. Hearing captures the variety of dialects and speech patterns of various characters. My only “complaint” is that the stories are longer than the typical short story (ranging in the 15,000-25,000 word range). They feel almost like novellas. I love “Dogstar” which is about two state highway patrolmen investigating the death of a homeless man. The story “Bush League” is a great story about the love life of a talent scout for a professional baseball team. The opening story, “A Better Class of People” kind of appalled me when I first read it; it’s about rednecks who beat up some college students who happened to visit a bar one day. But when I heard it aloud on the audiobook, I really appreciated the subtle characterizations and gradual rise in dramatic tension. Also, the spoken dialogue is really masterful — simple, guttural, good at conveying anger and dread. (There’s no ebook edition of this collection, but the book is still in print and relatively cheap.)
5. Ars Poetica: A Postmodern Parable (2003, Baen ebook, print book by Texas Review Press). No, I haven’t read it yet — so what do I know — but it’s an academic satire set in academic times about an aging poet in academia. Serious readers may groan at such books (hasn’t this subject been written to death? ) but I actually like the genre, and frankly Reynolds is precisely the type of author who is erudite and witty enough to pull it off. (Novelist George Garrett liked it a lot, and the novel eventually won a 2002 Texas Review literary prize.) I know 95% of readers may roll their eyes at the idea of reading another campus novel, but for fans of postmodern fiction and John Barth, this is our catnip.
6. Vox Populi: Novel of the Common Man (2013) is basically a novel in stories in a much lighter and gentler vein. It shows how ordinary Texans interact with one another in various places: the flea market, the car wash, the lunch cafe; perhaps it lacks the melodrama or violence of the Sandhill stories, but it’s also a quirky, entertaining read. Texas Book Lover Michelle Newby Lancaster wrote a nice review of it (archived version), saying
Clay Reynolds is uncannily skilled at rendering vignettes of strangers forced to occupy the same physical space. He is an astute observer of our smallest gestures and expressions and his dialogue is spot-on, complete with malapropisms that had me laughing aloud. His physical descriptions are detailed to an impressive degree. I could picture these people standing in front of me, to the last vivid detail. At the beginning of Vox, the nameless but not-quite-anonymous narrator seems to be a rather dull blank slate with no personality of his own and at the mercy of the seemingly stronger personalities surrounding him. As the sketches progress, though, our narrator begins to slowly but surely engage more substantively, confidently and empathetically – which is to say, successfully. It is a subtle performance.
Others? I confess that I have not read a lot of the other novels except maybe the blurbs. If you feel strongly about a novel, feel free to make a case for it in the comment section!
Essays to Read Online
Clay Reynolds has been diligent about publishing his essays, book reviews and academic articles online. (Really his website is full of great stuff). A lot of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s have not been digitized, but there are PDFs of some of his more interesting essays available.
TV Pandemic Log II (2020-2022). (PDF) During COVID, Reynolds watched a lot of movies and TV shows (as did all of us). He kept an idiosyncratic journal of everything he watched, assigning it a score and giving it a capsule review. He watched stuff from almost all the streaming services (and noted which service they’re on– helpful! ) He watched an awful lot of mysteries and historical dramas — and was very critical about series that didn’t quite get the history right.
Reaching the Summit: A Confession and a Valediction (PDF) (published in 2016) is one of Clay Reynolds’ most philosophical (and yes somber) essays. It’s about retirement and confronting the fact that the attainment of his intellectual and literary goals still leaves him unsatisfied.
Bookish Topics: Literary Worth and Popular Tastes (2000) describes how the struggle between popular fiction and literary fiction has always been with us.
From Castro to Cancun (2014). (PDF) Reynolds offered an eyewitness account of visiting Cuba at about the time that the Obama Administration loosened rules on travelling to that country. He said he enjoyed seeing the vintage cars on the road and thought the place was relatively free — though he felt certain that Cuba’s unique culture would soon be Americanized.
Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited, LE means that lending of this Kindle title is allowed, and APUB means it was published under an Amazon imprint.
Preface
I found some great deals on Smashwords titles which were valid in the last 2 weeks of December. Prices jumped back to normal in January, but my guess is that the prices are still pretty low.
I’ve been busy on publishing stuff for most of 2020, so haven’t been able to post this column in a while. With my new blogging strategy, I expect to be writing Robert’s Roundup columns once a month. I’ll post the column page at the beginning of the month and then add it to over it over time. This kills a lot of birds with one stone. First, it ensures that I post more regularly and that I can post individual links more regularly. I used to treat this post as being time-sensitive, but over the past year I’ve decided that it’s less important to publish temporary sale prices than to make people aware of new authors and books. If you want, you can always set up price alerts on ereaderiq if you want instant notifications (perhaps Bookbub has that same functionality by now; can’t remember). I belong to the Smashwords affiliate marketing program, so you’ll notice that I do direct links to Smashwords ebooks. (I doubt if my affiliate payouts have amounted to more than $5 over the past year). More importantly, I like Smashwords because it’s very author-friendly, DRM-free and pays great royalties to authors.
I’ve stopped providing direct links to Amazon books mainly because they cancelled my affiliate account, but also because I see no reason to promote the Kindle platform because it’s so dominant. Another reason is that it’s time consuming to manage all those links — and frankly everybody knows how to google. Anyway, I think it’s more important to link to the author’s own website because they can direct you to the ebookstore they like the best.
In 2020 55% of my ebook spending came from Amazon.com, 30% came from Smashwords, 10% came from Google Play Books (GPB) and 5% came from buying directly from the publisher.
I expect to buy a lot more ebooks from GPB over the next year. GPB now pays indie authors one of the highest rates in the publishing world. Amazon only pays 35% for ebooks priced below 2.99; indeed for ebooks with a larger file size, Amazon will reduce author royalties by 15 cents for each MB of the ebook file as a “delivery fee.” This is crap, and both Smashwords and Google Play Books charge no such fee. For that reason, I try to buy indie titles on GPB or Smashwords instead of Amazon for ebooks priced at below 2.99. Of course, Kindle Unlimited titles are exclusive to Amazon, so you have no choice.
Read by Strangers: Stories (Free!) by Philip Dean Walker (author website). A collection of sixteen queer stories exploring the complexities of the human experience. One review describes it as “result is a deep dissection of lives where the barriers to human connection can take on sometimes-comic, sometimes-monstrous proportions.”
Lethe Press has a variety of titles (notably gay fiction, sci fi, paranormal and some some general fiction and stories. Some good discounts here –highlights:
Vanishing Point by E.V. Legters (author website) — FREE! Novel about a turbulent affair a lonely housewife has with an emotionally unstable man. (called by Kirkus a “heartbreaking and exquisite story about emotional violence.”) See also: Connecting Underneath (on Amazon for $2, not SW) , her debut novel about teenage girl journey to discover who her father was. (Kirkus: engaging meditation on the most basic desire—to know oneself. )
Kissing Booth and other stories by A.C. Wise (3.75) — whoops, maybe I thought the price was lower? Gay surreal scifi fiction about time machines, robots, aliens, etc.
ReAnimus Press republishes out-of-print sci fi novels and story collections for 3.99 (no discount; it’s the same price as Amazon). (Update: I see that you can buy DRM-stuff for the same price directly from the publisher . If you subscribe to the newsletter, you get 20% off first purchase — and hopefully info about more promotions. I generally like buying directly from the publisher because author royalties tend to be higher). Still Smashwords has a lot of these titles — I found lots of James Gunn stories and Robert Silverberg novellas. From Gunn, I’m starting with Future Imperfect story collection, but there’s a lot to choose from. The Silverberg link above went to several 60,000 word collections of 3 novellas by well-known people. Wow, does sci fi have a lock on the 15,000 word novella?
John Flynn (aka Basil Rosa) Basil Rosa — a pseudonym (author website) for John Flynn has discounted all his 3.99 titles to 99 cents for this week — including his Lotion State Trilogy. Alas, I see that he has 3 poetry collections on Smashwords for free — which is great. Fun fact, Flynn served in Peace Corp Moldava in 1993-1995, and I lived in both Albania (1995-7) and Ukraine (1997-9) with Peace Corps and Soros Foundation (respectively). Moldava is right next door to Ukraine, and our country director in Albania came there directly in Moldava, so I have an affinity with this author already. His poetry comes from Leaf Garden which publishes a lot of free and low cost poetry.
Sussurus on Mars by Hal Duncan (1$) is another novella about Greek mythology, botany, philosophy, gay fiction
Richard Herley (author website) is a versatile English author who has already achieved a fair amount of commercial success and has published a lot of his titles on Smashwords (as well as Amazon). On both stores, a significant fraction of the ebooks are priced at free, but everything is under $3. On his author’s website, he has helpful advice about which books to read first and next.
Frank Prem is a gifted Australian poet who I mentioned in a previous column. (author website). I really love his stuff (and you should listen to Frank Prem’s youtube pages.) . He has two poetry ebooks on Smashwords: Pebbles to Poems (free) and Herjo Devastation – a poetic collaboration with a storyteller
Real World by Kathleen Jowett (author home page and book page). Novel by English writer about a gay woman torn between her desire to marry her girlfriend and the desire to serve as a vicar. From her website, a LGBTQ reading list. A few years ago Jowett published a well-received award-winning novel Speak its Name.
Some of the Amazon imprints produce very inexpensive ebooks of varying quality. Some titles though are superb (and you should check previous roundups for my recommendations — I frankly ignore most of the genre stuff and focus on the international authors and biographies. Follow this link to see which titles are 99 cents for the month. (check previous columns here, here and here), so maybe my recs will be sparser than usual. All are KU APUB, (but not lendable!).
The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo, trans. from the French by Nicholas Elliott. 99 cents (KU, APUB). French prize winner inspired by a historical event about a man who traveled to Guinea and conquered a region in order to build a railway. Reviews are mixed though.
Under the Radar
Talking is Wasted Breath (Tales from the Deccan Plateau) by Rasana Atreya (free, preorder on Amazon and Smashwords).
Gotcha! Inside Trump’s 2000 Campaign – A Novel by Ed Weinberger (99 cents). I usually pass on fiction about topical politics, but Weinberger is a legendary TV writer — wrote for Mary Tyler Moore, co-created Taxi and several other shows. Also, he and Ed Asner wrote an entertaining pseudo-history, Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution against right-wing hypocrites and nutjobs.
Three Stages of Amazement: A novel by Carol Edgarian (bought on sale for 2.99). (Author website). The first thing I noticed about the book page is that the author was the cofounder of Narrative Magazine (which is very well done). Wow, I read the first chapter a long while back — it’s a contemporary California story about love affairs, social classes, venture capital, current events (sorry for phoning it in; it’s been a while). But it seems competently written and Edgarian is definitely someone to watch (she’s even achieved a fair degree of mainstream success).
I swear, I keep bumping into the ebooks of John Vance, (author website) who is a retired academic who has written in a lot of genres — most titles run for 99 cents up to 2.99 on Amazon, so the price definitely is right. Professor and the Don’s Girl, Men Behaving Badly,
Empty Cell by Paulette Alden (author website). Alden won a Stegner Fellowship and wrote a novel about lynching in the 1940s.
Believe it or not, I bought one low priced collection of Penthouse Letters and found them surprisingly entertaining and well-written. Fun reading if you’re into that kind of thing — and not just as stroke material.
Dog Logic by Tom Stretlich (LE). (Author website) Satirical novel about a damaged caretaker at a pet cemetery. Stretlich’s thing is mainly being a playwright, so this is an extension of a play he wrote previously. I’m probably not describing the book fairly, so let’s hear from the author himself.
Regrets by Milton Schacter 1.99 (KU, LE). Well-reviewed crime novel about a defense attorney who is killed as a robber and returns to life as a 15 year old black boy. No author website, but the Amazon author profile is one of the longest I’ve ever read!
Inside the Robe: Judge’s Candid Tale of Criminal Justice in America by Katherine Mader (author website). (free)
Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and Making of Cultures by Antonio R. Damasio 0.99 Philosophical book about how homeostasis explains human evolution and lots of other things.
Newspaper Widow (Novel) by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
Snapshots by Eliot Parker. 99 cents. Stories set in Eastern Kentucky/West Virginia. Stories about life’s quirky ironies, usually with a twist.
Film Writing mini-guides by John Gaspard. The series is called Fast, Cheap Filmmaking Books (KU) . I got Fast, Cheap & Written That Way: Top Screenwriters on Writing for Low-Budget Movies for free.
Blink and It’s Gone Sales
(books which go temporarily on sale for a day and then jump back to regular price; to hear about them, you generally need to set up price alerts on ereaderiq).
Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz . 1.99 Award-winning book by Polish author whom Milan Kundera proclaims one of the great novelists of our century. Described as “a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns.” I tried reading Ferdydurke earlier without really getting into it, but my critic friend raved about his other book Pornografia, so I’m willing to give him a second look. (Sometimes I throw aside books too quickly — a personality flaw).
Second World War by Antony Beevor. 3.99 (a fat ebook!) A well-researched comprehensive book which retells the whole narrative
Ecstasy is Necessary: a practical guide to sex, relationships and oh, so much more. by Barbara Carrellas. (A guide to having a good sex life sells for 99 cents on amazon — what a deal!). If you’re looking for a great book about sex and relationships (seriously), I recommend the book Sexual Intelligence by Marty Klein. (Here’s the author’s website). I also have thumbed through but not actually read his two other books about porn and “America’s War on Sex.”
Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. (author website). This much lauded first novel is one of a series and about a communist double agent from Vietnam who travels to America in order to spy on immigrants already in America. He has written other novels The Refugees and The Committed which give different perspective on the plight of post-war Vietnamese. Nguyen has written lots of essays and fiction (here’s a recent essay from NYT called “Post-Trump Future of Literature”). Here’s a long excerpt:
That much of the literary world was willing to give Mr. Obama’s drone strike and deportation policies a pass, partly because he was such a literary, empathetic president, indicates some of the hollowness of liberalism and multiculturalism. Empathy, their emotional signature, is perfectly compatible with killing people overseas — many of them innocent — and backing up a police and carceral system that disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous and other people of color and the poor. It turns out that a president can have a taste for both drone strikes and annual reading lists heavy on multicultural literature.
And here, marginalized writers who tell stories about marginalized populations do not get a pass. Take immigrant literature. During the xenophobic Trump years, when immigrants and refugees were demonized, simply standing up for immigrants became a politically worthwhile cause. But so much of immigrant literature, despite bringing attention to the racial, cultural and economic difficulties that immigrants face, also ultimately affirms an American dream that is sometimes lofty and aspirational, and at other times a mask for the structural inequities of a settler colonial state. Most Americans have never heard of settler colonialism, much less used it to describe their country. That’s because Americans prefer to call settler colonialism the American dream.
Too much of immigrant and multicultural literature fails to rip off that mask. Yet the politicization of these populations does pose a threat to the white nation that Mr. Trump represents. White identity politics has always been the dominant politics of this country, but so long as it was ascendant and unthreatened, it was never explicitly white. It was simply normative, and most white writers (and white people) never questioned the normativity of whiteness. But the long, incomplete march toward racial equality from 1865 to the present has slowly eroded white dominance, with the most significant rupture occurring during the war in Vietnam.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves ($2). I’ve heard good things about this.
Indie /DRM-free Ebook Deals
Once or twice a year, the radical publisher Verso Books discounts critical/leftist ebooks. Most Verso titles are brilliant radical works — often about economics, sociology, media studies, literary criticism (and occasionally even fiction). To my delight, I saw that Derrida‘s Politics of Friendship was discounted. I am somewhat well-read in Derrida, but as it happens, I attended the first public reading of the 1st chapter while at JHU in 1989. Although Derrida’s analytical method is fairly abtruse, he recited his thoughts carefully and intensely (leading me to believe that I understand most of what Derrida was speaking about. (I made small talk with him at a wine and cheese party afterwards). Verso has a lot of interesting “deep thoughts” books; it’s definitely worth signing up for the newsletter to be informed of when things go on sale.
Note: Verso Books sells DRM-free versions directly to the consumer and in multiple formats. Everything is also on Amazon, but discounted prices come only from directly purchasing on Verso’s site.
Creative Commons — Academic — Public Domain
Some more free titles from Cornell U Press that I hadn’t picked up already. This set comes from the series, Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought. I’m reasonably well-versed in German literature and for a while was reading advanced stuff in German (including 2/3 of Hermann Broch‘s Sleepwalkers). Sleepwalkers is a great work; I probably should revisit it in an age of Trump.
On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought by Daniel Leonhard Purdy
The Total Work of Art in European Modernism by David Roberts
Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque by Jane O. Newman
Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge
Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman by Tobias Boes.
I have delved into the Cornell Open Access Project a bit. (See the newest free titles). There’s a lot there, and perhaps next month I’ll cover the offerings (many of which I’ve already downloaded). Suffice to say that on the Cornell website you can download epubs and pdfs, but on Amazon they are available at kindle files. If you download from Cornell directly, you should be sure to give the downloadable file a recognizable name. COAP has titles on a lot of subjects (maybe 1/4 are literary topics). Lots of social science, history and political economy,
Once in a Lifetime Deals
Improvement by Joan Silber, 2$
a
Poetry
See my blurb about R.S. Gwynn below.
Texas
Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island by Scott Semegran.
Levee—set in and around the Ship Channel, lush greenery, and crawfish boils of the Bayou City—is a thoughtful, sometimes ironic work that examines living in a time besieged by climate change and perpetual violence in a place forged from industry and greed. It’s also some of Otremba’s most personal work, drawing, as it does, from the poet’s own confrontation with mortality.
“He used his own illness as the background and metaphor for the illnesses of the world,” explains Otremba’s wife, Holly Holmes.
Demagoguery and Democracy by Patricia Roberts-Miller. (author blog).
Clay Reynolds is a distinguished and erudite Texas author (website) whom I’m currently interviewing. Curiously, despite his being born 16 years after me, he went to Trinity and we share a lot of cultural reference points. I’m excited to get into his fiction and essays which have overlooked way too long. I’ll be posting more about his fiction eventually, but two places to start is his 2004 public lecture A Cow Can Moo: The Irony of the Artistic Lie (PDF). It’s a detailed discussion about the evolution of a Texas writer’s sensibility and how you develop a sense of irony. Deep, heavy stuff. For something lighter, here’s a 2006 interview with Reynolds in Lone Star Literary Life. One curious thing about Reynolds is that he talks freely about his fiction. When Baen released ebook editions, he wrote new introductions for almost all of them.
From Barsoom to Malacandra: Musings on Things Past and Things to Come by John C. Wright (author website) Also: Transhuman and Subhuman. ( 99 cents KU, LE) Wright is a retired lawyer, editor and sci fi novelist. Here are two collections of essays about science fiction and the genre’s authors.
Review Copies Received
Erotica
To prepare for the interview with Texas novelist Clay Reynolds (author website), I received two great-looking print books by Clay Reynolds: Of Snakes & Sex & Playing in the Rain (essay collection) and
Printed books bought (Better World Books, Amazon, etc)
If you are looking for a great book about elephant society and how mammals communicate and emote, check out the brilliant and fascinating Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. by Carl Safina. (author home page). A great fascinating work about the animal kingdom.
Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Believe it or not, this comic was really big during college, but I never read it until a month ago.
Several volumes by George Singleton: These People are Us, Half-Mammals of Dixie, Calloustown, Between Wrecks.
Argument for Stillness by Erik Campbell. Found a poem in a litmag that blew me away, and finally tracked the book it came from.
How to Create a Flawless Universe: In Just Eight Days by Godfather Publications is one of my favorite novelty books. They’re giving away copies for nothing, and it is a clever humorous scrapbook kind of book.
Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. Lepore has covered weightier subjects, but this treatment of cultural history was engrossing.
Goethe, Goethe, Goethe. I’ve been a fan of the Princeton U Press multivolume set of Goethe Translations from the 1990s. This Christmas I broke down and bought two volumes — one of plays, the other of poetry. (That means I have 3 volumes so far).
No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems, 1970-2000 by R.S. Gwynn. Gwynn came highly recommended to me by Texas novelist Clay Reynolds, and he happens to be spending his retirement very close to Houston! By the way, I’ll be reading more works by Clay Reynolds, stay tuned.
I couldn’t resist. I’m an admirer of the book cover designer George Salter, a German-born Jewish artist who designed some immortal covers — both for German publishers and (after fleeing Nazi Germany) all the major US publishers. Someone gathered all his illustration work with commentary and packaged it into a print book. called Classic Book Jackets by Milton Glaser. You can view a sampling of Salter’s covers here . I have picked up a handful of books with Salter covers already, but it might be nice to collect these books (all the books sound cool too).
Personville Press Giveaways and Deals
I run Personville Press, a small literary book press where all the ebooks cost less than $4. All the titles are discounted on Smashwords for less that price — and usually under $1.50. Pay attention to any 100% coupon codes which I occasionally list below — they can be redeemed only a small number of times, so first come, first serve. Smashwords only sells epub versions of these titles, but you can easily convert them to Amazon’s mobi format by using Kindle Previewer or Calibre.
Interview with the Sphinx. By Jack Matthews. ($2.99). Hyperintellectual Tom Stoppard-like play which reads like a novel about a strange interview with the ancient Sphinx character. Freud and Florence Nightingale show up too. I loved this play and even produced an audio version of it (3.99 on cdbabyand itunes), but the script reads well too.
A Worker’s Writebookby Jack Matthews . $2.99 Matthews distributed a photocopied version of this writing guide to his Ohio U. creative writing students over the decades.
Three Times Time Story Sampler by Jack Matthews (Always Free!) US Amazon customers can sometimes get it for free, but to make things easier, you can down these files directly without having to register: Epub, Mobi.
I’ll be posting a superlong Robert’s Roundup this weekend and then another normal-sized one in the last week of December about the Smashwords (SW) ebook deals.
As a general rule, I do NOT link to Amazon anymore (unless there is a special reason). Everyone knows how to use search engines, plus it saves time. For the most part, all of my column links will go to DRM-free links (mainly Smashwords, Project Gutenberg, etc). I generally try to link to the author’s home page if there is one.
Here are 3 labels I use when listing titles on Amazon.
KU means that the ebook is part of Kindle Unlimited collection. I mention this not to encourage people to sign up for KU, but notably because KU ebooks are more likely to be discounted to free — so you can set up price alerts. These free promotions are limited to 3 days every 90 days. Often authors keep their ebooks in KU for the first 3-6 months only, so you should verify if it is still in KU.
LE means that lending is allowed for this Amazon ebook. This lending functionality is somewhat limited, but better than nothing. Hey, if you want to borrow one of these lendable titles, feel free to email me the title. I will almost always say yes! (idiotprogrammer AT fastmailbox.net)
APUB means that ebook is published under an Amazon Imprint (see a list). This means that Amazon’s inhouse publishing department has acquired these titles and promote them actively using Amazon’s tools. These titles stay low-priced, and their prices tend to remain the same for the entire month. Every 3-6 months, their prices go down to 99 cents or 1.99 (so, set those price alerts!) Generally, these titles are high quality, more likely genre, slickly produced and promoted (in the best sense of the word). Many are from international authors. Little A is for literary fiction; AmazonCrossing is for translated titles.
Why do so many authors and publishers refuse to make Amazon ebooks lendable?
But Amazon invented a cool sharing/lending function for their titles. It actually works pretty well, is of limited duration and poses no piracy risk for publishers. It might reduce the tendency of someone to buy the title, but more than likely it just gives the person more time to explore the ebook. That is usually a good thing.
As it happens, on Amazon almost zero big publishers have enabled this feature, and about 50% of indie authors haven’t enabled it either. Why? Honestly, I really miss not being able to lend purchased titles with friends or swap recommendations. There’s so much cool stuff which I’d love to share with friends (or vice versa). By opting out of lending, authors are missing out on the possibility to get ebooks in front of new customers.
In praise of DRM free ebooks
I alternate between hating and loving Amazon (now I’m in a hating phase), but I have especially strong feelings against ebook DRM. It’s so unnecessary and counterproductive. I noticed that imore has a very nice list of DRM-free publishers. Obviously Smashwords is the biggest outlet for DRM-free, but there’s also Verso, Humble Bundle, Tor, Baen and various tech publishers (Packt, Oreilly, No Starch, Apress).
DRM-free ebooks are better because their use cannot be limited or cancelled by a bookstore’s infrastructure. I bought a few dozen ebooks from ebook sellers who went out of business, and now I am stuck. This day will happen for all booksellers eventually. The usual excuse for DRM is to prevent piracy. This is not a terrible argument, but it adds an extra layer of complexity and dependency. Also, aside from reducing piracy on high-priced bestselling titles, DRM doesn’t really help most indie authors. (One method that would deter me is “social DRM” — i.e., using identifying watermarks — like “This ebook is licensed exclusively to Robert Nagle”).
This is not a great risk right now, but what if Google and Amazon fought and Amazon suddenly decided: hey, let’s not support a Kindle app on android devices anymore! What could consumers do? Essentially nothing. They could not move their purchased ebooks out of one ebook distribution system into another.
Practically speaking, major publishers and authors sell only at bookstores which use DRM. You can submit ebooks DRM-free to bookstores, but it would be somewhat complicated to move these ebooks into another book infrastructure.
On the other hand, books without DRM have their own problems.
First, you have to keep your files safe. (Solution: Upload everything into Google Drive or Dropbox. Problem solved!)
Second, you need an easy interface to view cloud-based ebooks offline. That means uploading ebooks, organizing into shelves and making the interface usable. We don’t have a good interface for that yet, but we are almost there.
Third, you have to manage space limitations. This is actually a bigger problem than you believe. Devices have limited storage space, and Google Play is a huge memory hog, and there’s no way to figure out which ebooks are taking up the most space. Fortunately, this problem is solvable though the booksellers have not tried to fix it.
New blog feature: Crappy Interstitial Ebook Ads (sort of)
A year ago I started offering free ebook ads for Smashwords ebooks. Smashwords is DRM-free and indie-friendly and provides better royalties. Second, if I’m recommending ebooks, it costs me nothing really to provide free ads for them. I signed up for SW’s affiliating marketing program (which meant having to cancel participation in Amazon’s affiliate program — good riddance). Making money is not my primary motive here, but I’m not allergic to doing so.
A few months ago, I had a dose of reality. First, earnings from SW affiliate marketing program were practically nonexistent. This is partly because ebooks bought directly from SW are still a small portion of the ebook market. But 55% of my web surfers on this blog read on mobile phones, and another 8% are on tablets. My right sidebar containing the ads doesn’t even show up for these people.
I still want to feature some ebook promotions and am working on a solution that is not too distracting or complicated to implement.
Fortunately, WordPress might help with that. I really don’t want to use a plugin — especially an ad server, but the built in Gutenberg text editor lets you insert custom boilerplate blocks of text wherever you want. So I could design a few boilerplates and insert them strategically in blogposts. Perspicacious readers may notice that at the bottom of ebook columns, I’ve been doing this anyway. I may enhance this slightly — and keep them under the fold so that they don’t appear on the main URL for literary-oriented posts.
On the main URL I will include short posts including my promotions in differentiated texts. These short promotional posts won’t be too distracting, I promise. Also, even though I potentially derive financial benefit from them, I still endorse these ebooks!
I want this blog to remain personal and basically noncommercial while still promoting no-DRM publishers and indie authors. Hopefully these new changes will not change the overall readability of this blog.
(“Mike’s Likes” is the first book column for what will soon be a regular feature on this blog. Michael Barrett is a San Antonio critic and longtime college friend. He has been writing erudite cinema reviews at Popmatters for over a decade — I even did a long interview with him about cinema on this blog. Although Barrett is happy with the film critic label, he reads widely too. With his permission, I will occasionally compile some “book reports” which Barrett has recently posted on Facebook).
The narrator is a cultured married woman who seems to spend her days flying the world for rendezvous with her spy-lover, who changes his appearance easily and communicates cryptically via National Geographics.
The novel’s present is a couple of weekends, one in Guatemala where he calls her on the phone to cancel and say he’ll meet her next weekend in Toronto, where she actually lives or used to with her family, and then that Toronto weekend as she wanders through her memories and fantasies of her life and repressed tragedies, until she magically comes to a resolve that may be as imaginary as everything else, for we suspect she’s refracting her experience through breakdowns and dreams. The ending involves a doppelganger derived partly from the author’s own life. It becomes impossible to know if she really travels the world for spy affairs–and if she does, whether she just sleeps with random lovers whom she identifies as the same person, or whether these are messages to herself, or whether she stays home and reads magazines.
The style is lucid and hyper-real yet bewildering and dreamy, esp. when she has a dialogue with a woman in a Bonnard painting that echoes the narrator of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” The whole affair becomes increasingly psychological and symbolic, with tossed-off nuggets like “I was afraid that I had finally capitulated to vacuity” and incidents like this (amid the curious punctuation, I must wonder why the semi-colon):
“When I was forced to come to a stop by a street photographer, a lean young man in a green corduroy suit who stood feet astride in my path, I became angry. He had apparently taken my picture. He offered me the print for a dollar. I uttered a sharp No! He could not have known that he copied a likeness I no longer wanted. He persisted in holding the picture up to me, saying, It’s no use to me. Nor to me, I answered. He tore it up before my eyes; tossed the glossy bits into the gutter. Perhaps, it occurred to me, through the ‘evil eye of the box’ the photographer had removed a soul that was weary of wandering. Despite the breeze, the pieces of my soul just lay there. Good, I said to myself. Good riddance.”
When the rats come out, or What a peste
Audiobook of Albert Camus’ THE PLAGUE, Checked out of the library!
My second recent visit to Oran after THE SHELTERING SKY. The most surprising thing is how this supposedly atheist/existentialist tract of alienation and desperation could so easily lend itself to a Catholic interpretation. The priest is presented as in dialectic with another character (not the narrator but the diarist) but they’re not so much opposites as alternate facets; both believe man is tainted by Original Sin, though the latter calls it the plague we all carry, the guilt of collaborating with civilization’s crimes. The priest is given two long sermons, the latter of which has him arriving at a potentially heretical-existential “all or nothing” theory of choosing God consciously. Both characters come to the same conclusion of committing themselves completely to their convictions and die of them. Much is made of the “crucifying” nature of the death contortions, which take about as long as the agonies on the cross, and the plague breaks its fever, as it were, on Christmas. The narrator-doctor is even watched over by a beatific mother. The finale of this essentially philosophical book, which aims to be a “factual record” in the manner of Defoe’s (invented) “Journal of the Plague Year,” pulls off two brilliantly orchestrated bits of melodrama.
Although the setting feels removed from time and space to accentuate isolation, to the extent that the action takes place in a French colonial town in Algeria (with no Algerians–that conscience was pricked with the murder in THE STRANGER), this can also be seen as a political commentary or allegory of the colonial adventure that Camus presumably foresaw swallowing up and depleting France, for several characters (like the priest) state that the town has brought its troubles on itself. This arguably makes it less universal than an exclusively and specifically French catastrophe. The one who’s glad of the plague is a criminal who wishes to escape justice. His implication is that when everyone’s in the same boat, all are alike and therefore it’s a town of criminals. No explicit political comments are made; it’s left implicit for those who can see to see, with remarks on the initial incompetence of officials and special disaster meted out to a magistrate. (This would be a very different reading from the more common one of celebrating French resistance to Nazis.)
TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz
Checked out of the library!
For anyone who’s wished they had recorded conversations of their brilliant witty friends, at least one person went and did it.
The raw material, accent on raw, of Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1968 TALK is tape-recorded conversations among three arty New York friends from the summer of 1965. Two women, one of whom (“Marsha”) is recording these tapes, even when she’s absent, and a male homosexual painter (before it was cool to discuss such things casually and frankly) hash and thrash over every minute analysis of each other’s behavior and blather endlessly, sometimes hilariously about sex, friends, lovers, shrinks, art, abortions and the cat, roughly in that order, while lounging on the beach, interrupting each other, preparing and eating food, and hanging out. They’re full of exaggeration, one-liners, insight and witty play for each other’s benefit.
Apparently Linda/Marsha didn’t alter the tapes, only selected which ones to use from hundreds of hours, and they’re merely transcribed as play dialogue without directions or commentary. References to Warhol (whom they know personally) remind us that he believed a film is what happens when you turn on a camera and record whatever someone is doing, and that sometimes the camera alters their behavior and sometimes not. These friends are all circa 30 (one divorcee, who has just emerged from alkie rehab, is “punching 30”), reminding us also of the line in “The Great Gatsby” (quoted, though not that line) in which the narrator suddenly ends a chapter by remembering that it’s his 30th birthday. As Rosenkrantz reminds us in a 50-years-later note, this came out one year before Roth’s PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT and mortified her mother.
Ray Russell’s brisk THE CASE AGAINST SATAN reads like a blueprint for THE EXORCIST. In what may be a coincidence, one character is a Father Halloran, and someone with that name was involved in a 1949 case that allegedly inspired Blatty. Mostly dialogue or argumentative dialectic punctuated with grotesque moments. As an example of the author’s careful construction, a lengthy passage on “dung” might make us think he’s avoiding the word “shit,” and he is, but only so he can later use it to maximum effect in a single moment when it has the whole paragraph to itself. The argument carefully leaves itself ambiguous as it exposes what must have seemed especially shocking elements in 1962, but although the main priest states at the end that all the elements could have a rational explanation, he forgets to mention the catapulting against the wall and that fact that three people had to pry the victim off. The ingeniously handled climax tosses in a quick whodunit.
If Ursula Le Guin’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN has a continual shifting of reality superficially similar to Philip K. Dick, the earlier CITY OF ILLUSIONS is an onion-peeler that keeps redefining what we should believe before revealing its final truth. The amnesiac lynx-eyed alien hero, who awakes naked and frantic in a forest and makes his way across a North America of a few millennia in the future, might foreshadow other amnesiac heroes like in Silverberg’s LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE. A romantic picaresque full of vivid scenes, basic characters, shifts of setting that keeps a tight grip on the hero’s perspective even at his most confused. The fortuitous ending is based on tremendous mental powers and the ability to maintain two identities in one’s brain.
Barbara Comyns’ THE JUNIPER TREE, named after a Grimm tale, has a deadpan “naive” female narrator (as in the wonderful OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTH’S) calmly unrolling what seems at times like a fairy-tale romance, at times a realistic portrait of a single mother making her way in the world of antiques and junk, at times a casual reportage of tragedies that come out of the blue and are told with the same sense of detail and balance as the happier events. A world of vivid passing characters is conveyed in this rapidly moving tale.
How to live with loss in a science fiction universe
RE: Sarah Pinsker’s SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA Checked out of the library!
Most of the stories are narrated by lesbians (two of them rock stars), and all are about the consequences of living with things lost: mothers, grandmothers (a nod to Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric”), an arm (the only story with a male protagonist), a husband (the story about a straight couple), an imaginary daughter (a nod to John Wyndham’s MIDWICH CUCKOOS, and this is one of two stories about sirens on rocks), a viable world. Two stories submerge the pulp adventure to a distant undiscussed memory that still has repercussions. One Stevensonian tale that’s really about self-acceptance is told by what used to be called a hermaphrodite and now is called intersex.
The last two stories are the funniest and most brilliant: “The Narwhal” (the only story not previously published) is about a road trip in a supercar shaped like a whale. “And Then There Were (N-One)” nods to Agatha Christie in a multiverse conference in which all the attendees are variants of the same person (named Sarah Pinsker, but the narrator isn’t “our” Pinsker who won a Nebula, but she’s there too) and somebody gets murdered. It’s about how we’re never satisfied with our choices, even good ones, and it’s not really a spoiler to say the lady-or-tiger ending is totally appropriate. Compare with Sean Farrell’s time-travel novel MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT.
“Our Lady of the Open Road”, the least fantastical story here, is the one that won the Nebula, while a whopping four others were nominees–including “(N-One)”, in which the Nebula Award is used as a murder weapon (!) and which was also a Hugo nominee. In short, this book is a one-stop for recently acclaimed stories and a very gentle intro to SF for people who might be nervous about it.
When the honeymoon’s over, baby
Antal Szerb’s JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT NYRB edition, translated by Len Rix, Checked out of the library!
I can easily believe this is among the 20th Century’s most delicate and pleasurable novels, although it feels like a spoiler to call it a comedy and perhaps it’s really not. It’s a human comedy, or humane comedy.
This 1937 Hungarian work, also known as THE TRAVELER and (most literally) THE TRAVELER AND THE MOONLIGHT, is a kind of proto-existential odyssey about a hapless young misfit, chafing at working for his father’s business, who tries to cure his abnormality by marrying a woman who scandalously divorced her rich husband for him, but he semi-accidentally ditches her on the honeymoon for a dreamlike stay in Italy, as though he has Stendhal Syndrome. In a state of inertia marked by restlessness and panic, he reminisces about his youth with insular brother/sister play-acting twins (along with a brash scoundrel and a Jewish scholar who converts to become a Catholic monk) and indulges thoughts of the suicidal death-wish, which he discusses with a bombastic religious/literary Hungarian colleague and a Christian English doctor after a brief affair with a good-natured, gloriously stupid American “art student.” There’s a rich Persian “tiger” and surreal and absurd moments.
Could be accurately yet misleadingly described to sound like a gloomy plod, when in fact it’s funny and surprising, the work of an urbane witty man whose compassion for others, even at his most satirical and jaundiced, is based upon knowing and forgiving himself. Friendship and understanding are major themes, as well as love and gently observed despair. Although touching on grim topics, it wears them with the cosmopolitan irony we associate with Kafka, Kundera and other Eastern Europeans.
It’s a pleasure to be in the presence of this creative generous mind, whose other works include untranslated histories of Hungarian and world literature that make him seem like his country’s Martin Seymour-Smith. Speaking of whom, MSS’ Guide to Mod World Lit doesn’t seem to know this novel but remarks of Szerb’s history of world lit that its author “has been, of course, told off by everyone in the most grudging manner, even while they make use of it.” Szerb has also written a fantasy-thriller, THE PENDRAGON LEGEND. Must track down.
According a German source on Wiki’s page, when Szerb was sent to a labor camp in 1944 for his Jewish origin (though raised a Catholic), he rejected friends’ attempts to get him released on false papers, and that’s why he died there the following year. Let’s pause to think about that.
