A man I haven’t thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath.
Mary Meigs wrote this piece in spring 2001 while she was recovering from a stroke, and which is reproduced here exactly as she typed it, Meigs writes: “In occupational therapy, it was a great joy to use the old Underwood electric typewriter to strengthen the fingers of my left hand.”
When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.
Is it true that Gilbert Sorrentino has written a brilliant novel called Gold Fools (Green Integer), a story of grizzly prospectors and leathery cowpokes, entirely in questions?
The twenty-one stories by Morley Callaghan that appeared in The New Yorker between 1928 and 1938 have been gathered into a small volume by the author’s son Barry, who is the publisher of Exile Editions. Reading these stories today is a little like reading Ben Katchor’s cartoon narratives: they are strongly flavoured with anachronism.
There are few appearances by God in The Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books), a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri’s settings are both secular and multicultural, and the challenge facing her characters is to navigate between India and America.
The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement. A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, with a whopping 535 beautifully designed pages, is not just a who’s-who list, it’s a definitive resource in which each director and his or her work is analyzed: a massive, exhaustive undertaking that is rewarding and successful.
The frontispiece of Eunoia by Christian Bök (Coach House) is a drawing of a cone, a line, a sphere and a paraboloid, all nestled inside a cylinder. This complicated arrangement of lines and points illustrates perfectly how my mind worked while I was reading this book.
