Chap’d

Chad Reynolds, who reviewed two adventuresome novels and two poetical collections for Open Letters is set to release a short collection of his own poems, Victor in the New World, on Thursday, January 3rd, 8 pm at the paint-bespattered headquarters of Rope-a-Dope Press in South Boston. Music, libations, and live poetry will be in attendance, as ought you be. (Establishment icon Bill Knott calls the chapbook, “the debut of a great new poet,” which is all that need be said).

And while you’re whetting your appetite for chapbooks, note that Open Letters contributors Sampson Starkweather, Chris Tonelli, and Sommer Browning will be releasing all-new collections of their own work from Denver’s horseless press in the coming months, each of which books you can own & read for five dollars each. Which you should do, and presently.

And last but far from least, Chicago’s Dancing Girl Press has just released an exciting and startling collection of collaborative poems from Open Letters contributors Elisa Gabbert and Kathy Rooney. Something Really Wonderful can and should be yours.

& while your order(s) are being processed & dispatched, please while some time with these links to the poets’ work online…

The Millions’ “A Year in Reading”

As an antidote to the herd mentality that tends to plague so many end-of-year ‘Best of’ lists, The Millions, a vibrant, polyphonic literature blog, is presenting their annual ‘Year in Reading’ feature. This is a month-long procession that’s as fun to visit every morning as an Advent calendar. Simply put, contributors have been asked to write about their most notable reading experiences in 2007, regardless of whether the books in question were published this year. The results are predictably diverse: you can find Arthur Phillips touting Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Joshua Ferris brooding contentedly over Henry James’ The Ambassadors, Megan O’Rourke delineating the pleasures of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica, David Leavitt championing Pierre Bayard’s much maligned How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, and much, much more.

Open Letters’ Sam Sacks was also invited to participate, and his entry, lauding Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, has just appeared. Go here to find Sacks’ post (in which he affirms his patriotism by spelling ‘Grey’ with an ‘a’—take that, Limeys!), and go here for The Millions’ ‘Year in Reading 2007’ introduction and table of contents.

And, as ever, be sure to comment on the contributors’ choices, and leave a few favorite titles of your own!

From our Archives…

Haply Open Letters readers have at times wondered what exactly the titles under our Features from the Archive heading found on the sidebar refer to. Let us, then, try to elucidate!

“The Bard of Everybody” is Garrett Handley’s April review of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare. In it, Handley takes us through the head-spinning variables that textual scholars must tackle when attempting to compile an authoritative edition of each of the Swan of Avon’s plays. The RSC’s attempt, he reports, is not without faults, but the effort makes for fascinating discussion. (Who has considered, for instance, the scope of textual errors due to drunkenness?)

“Death by Landscape” is John Cotter’s July review of Annie Dillard’s latest (and, there seems to be some speculation, possibly last) novel, The Maytrees. Cotter is properly reverent of much of Dillard’s earlier nonfiction, but, as he puts it in the start, “The novel is an inherently dramatic medium and for a writer who has little interest in drama the novel can be an especial crapshoot.”

“Fumbling Men” is Jeff O’Keefe’s June review of Don DeLillo’s September 11 novel Falling Man. O’Keefe gives us a sensitive account of the hits and misses in this book, and we get from him an acute sense of what a tremendous challenge it remains for artists attempting to confront that day of days.

So be sure to glance back at these fine pieces—and remember that every month we’ll be displaying three more from the vault!

reading in the works ~ March 1st

This is early notice, to be sure, but save the date: Open Letters Monthly has just scheduled its first public event: a reading slash first anniversary party on the first of March two thousand and eight in Cambridge Massachusetts. Joshua Harmon, whose debut novel, Quinnehtukqut we had the pleasure of recommending in November, will be reading excerpts from the book (now in its second printing). The spectacular poet Sommer Browning, whose work has twice been featured in Open Letters, will read as well. And if you’ve seen December’s issue, you’ve seen Adam Golaski’s groundbreaking translation of the Green Knight. Come along March first, and you’ll be able to hear it. And from the translator’s mouth, no less.

We’ll be convening at the Lily Pad gallery in Inman Square at 7:30pm. As I say, this is early notice, and we’ll be updating the blog as events develop. Meanwhile, you can get to know our readers better here, here, and here.

‘Best Of’ Befuddlement

It’s December and so ‘tis the season to stare in glassy-eyed confusion at the competing ‘Best of’ book lists put forth by our leading periodicals. The New York Times; has of course rendered their judgments, as have The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor.

And whom, you ask, should you trust? Happily, Open Letters can be of some service: a number of the books chosen for year-end distinction were reviewed here. Follow the links to find pieces on Jon Clinch’s Twain pastiche Finn, Hermione Lee’s massive biography of Edith Wharton, Annie Dillard’s vastly overpraised Maytrees, Norman Mailer’s Castle in the Forrest, and Richard Russo’s small-town epic Bridge of Sighs. We’ve also got a Peer Review of the critic’s darling On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan.

And spare a moment, if you can, to chime into the comments field with your thoughts on these lists, and your own choices for the best of 2007.

In memory of Elizabeth Hardwick

Open Letters mourns the passing of Elizabeth Hardwick, subtle novelist, prescient literary historian, and mighty critic. Throughout the sad turmoil of her marriage to poet Robert Lowell, and throughout the herculean labor of helping to found and shape the New York Review of Books, she, more than any writer of her day, managed to be consistently brilliant in her own writing. Her early novels, the most famous of which is Sleepless Nights, display a winning agility of prose and a great deal of crackling-true dialogue. Her ground-breaking study of heroines in American literature, Seduction & Betrayal, is a marvelous work only she could have written. Her slim biography of Herman Melville is a masterpiece of the miniaturist’s art, shaming more elephantine biographies with its grace and power. But it is some future volume of her collected essays that will bear her confidently down to all posterities - it was in this form that she achieved the perfect balance between steep learning and almost chatty informality, breaking the form free from prewar armchair-stuffiness and charting its course into a new millennium.

Her clear, strong, inclusive voice is now gone from our cacophony. It will be sorely missed.

The new Quarterly Conversation

For nearly three years now, Scott Esposito has been singlehandedly editing The Quarterly Conversation, a wide-ranging, erudite, and fun literary journal. How Esposito manages to put together a packed online issue four times a year, while keeping up his lively blog, is open to surmise—web-savvy gnomes may be somehow involved. But however he does it, the fruit of his labor is ours, and the Winter 2008 issue of The Quarterly Conversation offers much for the reaping.

Part of this issue is devoted to Hispanic literature, and there is a great deal that will be eye-opening to readers in the United States. Here for instance, is Elizabeth Wadell on Jose Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert:

Without diminishing their intrinsic literary merit, I think we could call some books national classics, read for what they say about a country’s enduring anxieties. In the United States, Huck Finn and The Scarlet Letter would fall into that category. In Mexico, one work would certainly be Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de soledad (Labyrinth of Solitude), and another would be Las batallas. Las batallas is about adolescence, both of a boy named Carlos and of his country, Mexico. It is a look at memory—individual and collective—and the way that collective memory fuses into history and national identity. It is also a specifically Mexican look at the economic and cultural shifts of the 20th century.

Of course, this issue also has a piece from Open Letters’ Sam Sacks on the great and underrated Russian novelist Vasily Grossman, with a particular focus on Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate. Sacks writes,

[Grossman] writes about artillerymen, snipers, radio-operators (who were mostly women), sappers, orderlies, and air-force pilots. He writes about party members and secret police, as well as prisoners of the gulag, hardened criminals, kulaks, and old terrified Bolsheviks who mistakenly supported Trotsky. He writes about the Shtrums, bourgeois Muscovites hovering charily beneath the cloud of Stalinism and bracing against the approaching storm of the Wehrmacht. He writes about Adolf Eichmann, General Paulus, Lieutenant-Generals Yeremenko and Chuikov, and, in one remarkable cameo, Stalin himself.

But it is invariably the small glory and tragedy of the individual that catches Grossman’s eye, even amidst the turmoil of combat, and all the truisms of war—whether about it being great or being hell—shrink away as if embarrassed by the tender attention Grossman pays to every living person and to every death.

So go explore Quarterly Conversation! And then satisfy your curiosity about the man behind the journal by reading the wonderfully personal essay Scott Esposito wrote for Open Letters in October.

Tarpaulin Sky

Tarpaulin Sky, the small press Elisa Gabbert so ably reviewed in our pages this March has just celebrated the first print issue of their magazine. Open Letters contributors Sampson Starkweather and Shafer Hall are both a part of their august manifest. Our poetry editor, too.

A review of a review of a book on how to review books

Wyatt Mason, writing in the December issue of Harper’s, takes a detour in his review of the new Updike collection of book reviews in order to make a few general remarks about the state of book reviewing in general. He pulls in quotes on the subject from a variety of sources - Cynthia Ozick, Heidi Julavits, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edmund Wilson, and the rest of the usual suspects - citing their various (but uniformly pessimistic) views on the craft of book reviewing. And when he’s done, he comes to a curious conclusion:

Let us concede them their points, such as they are, while not failing to note that the more functional and specific traits that these advocates would wish a work of criticism to exhibit are left unqualified. What criticism might practically entail - what tactics, what techniques, what fine tools - is left unelaborated except in the most amorphous (to care, to think) terms. And so, when Zadie Smith tells us, in her own recent 8,000-word manifesto on these matters, ‘What I am imagining is, I hope, a far more thorough reader,’ what is one left to suppose but that the true critic, like a unicorn or a yeti, must reside in the imagination?

For those of you who might wonder if there’s any validity to Mason’s confusion, check out our December issue, in which Steve Donoghue reviews a book on the very subject of book-reviewing, Gail Pool’s Faint Praise. Perhaps it’ll help you to determine for yourselves whether or not critics are just figments of your imagination.

War and Peace

Some of you may have noticed the arrival in bookstores of the new War and Peace translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky - and if you did, you were one step ahead of the august London Times Literary Supplement, which has thus far ignored the book … at least until their November 7th issue, wherein their sarcastic columnist J.C. had this to say:

War and Peace is often thought of by unfamiliars to be a ‘heavy’ book. On the contrary - it skips right along. However, P & V’s ‘War and Peace’ is heavy in another sense: it weighs 3 1/4 lbs. For that reason, among others, we are sticking with the excellent Rosemary Edmonds, available in two volumes from Penguin Classics.

Not the most informative of critiques, it must be admitted. If you’re still on the fence about whether or not to burden yourself (in all senses of the term), consult our December issue and see if Steve Donoghue’s review helps to decide you, one way or the other.