Posts on “Outward Bound: Links”

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“As a survival mechanism, and an attempt to short-circuit any retreat into the inner sanctum of art, this is perfectly okay. Yet Mr. Rieff’s discomfort with the details — surely his stock-in-trade in his previous studies of Cuba, Miami, or Bosnia — gives “Swimming in a Sea of Death” a muffled and meandering texture. Unlike his mother, Mr. Rieff is a born reporter, drawn to stories instead of the great abstractions. But since organizing his mother’s extinction into a shapely narrative strikes him as a sort of sacrilege, there is no story. There are only those same unanswerable questions, surfacing over and over in this increasingly disheveled, redundant book.”

- James Marcus on David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death

comment Susan Sontag

“This seems to me to get at the heart of some of the problems of literary fiction: in short, and to be totally bald about it, perhaps novelists often feel so alienated from the world that they end up writing about worlds which fail to reconnect with readers. This is more about class alienation than anything else. I’m tired of reading books about writers and teachers, books that seem to imagine writers and teachers as the only people whose inner lives are worthy of consideration.”

- Anne Fernald on Contemporary Fiction by way of Tom Perrotta

“But in my opinion, judgment is only the precursor to criticism, its necessary spark but not at all its fulfillment, which is only to be found in the further elucidation of the way the work constitutes itself as a work of fiction or poetry, of the specific nature of the experience of reading the work attentively.”

- Dan Green discussing Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

“Alice Sebold’s second novel The Almost Moon will probably not be categorized as literary fiction by most readers, but more than anything else this is because her first novel The Lovely Bones was such a smash bestseller. If Lovely Bones had sold 5000 copies instead of a million, Almost Moon probably would be considered literary fiction. So is failure actually an essential rather than an accidental attribute of literary fiction?”

- Levi Asher

“One of my tests of a novel is whether I flip straight from the last page right back to the first in order to reread it. Another is whether I bash my head against the edge of my desktop in utter and hopeless envy. Both are the case with Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses…”

- L. Lee Lowe

(via BooksInq.)

Jamelah at Litkicks has some things to say about the Zadie Smith essay in the Guardian last weekend. 



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