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Monday, March 17, 2008

I Get So Excited Sometimes

posted by on March 17 at 14:23 PM

So apparently, there’s a twice-yearly magazine called The New Haven Review that “was founded to resuscitate the art of the book review.” This already makes me swoon, but there’s even better news: Their website is going to be devoted to reviews of “unfairly neglected books,” no matter when the books were originally released. They even define “unfairly neglected:”

…that doesn’t mean Walter Kirn dissed the book in the Times and nobody else reviewed it. It means the book was missed by the Times, The New York Review, Washington Post Book World, etc., etc. As in, nobody’s heard of the book.

And! On the first page is a review of David Markson’s splendid Reader’s Block, just so you know that these motherfuckers mean business.

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1

Reader's Block was an awesome book. Some years ago I also found some of Markson's earlier "entertainments," as he calls them, which are pretty hilarious short pulp fiction pieces.

His last couple books looked basically like rehashes of Reader's Block, so I didn't bother. I think he might've run out of ideas there.

Posted by Gabriel | March 17, 2008 2:56 PM
2

True, but rehashes of Reader's Block are better than rehashes of The Davinci Code, say. Markson is one of the few writers who gets a pass from me.

And they're releasing reissues of a ton of Markson's early pulp stuff--there are some westerns by him coming out in the summer that I'm really excited for--so that's going to be fun. It's just unfortunate that they'll be better reviewed than Reader's Block was when it was released.

Posted by Paul Constant | March 17, 2008 3:51 PM

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