Chekhov's Mistress
March The Believer
I guess it’s a bit late to be talking about The Believer’s March issue, but I picked it up last week and it made my downtime all the more enjoyable.
We got Kafka, Richard Powers on the future of future medicine and narrative (see also Jenny’s post on Ishiguro’s related thoughts on the subject), and Meghan O’Rourke’s interview of Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker and editor of Elizabeth Bishop’s unpublished drafts and notes, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box (see also audio interview of Quinn at The New Yorker).
David Shields has a blog-like (cringe if you will; I did, as I always do when I see that comparison being thrown around) article subtitled “Why the Lyric Essay is Better than Fiction.” While this “manifesto” is mostly just made of lists of authors and supporting quotes parsed by Shields’s interjections, it’s the beginning of an interesting contemplation of the value of the novel.
Ben Marcus: “The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all of the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened that a fiction writer daily wakes to. Once can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that ‘it’s just fiction,’ a vacuous but prevelant dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. ‘Lyric essay’ is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from the reader at the outset…The implied secret here is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers take note. Some of the best fiction these days is being written as non-fiction.”
comments
One of the things that I think speaks well of The Believer is that it publishes works by Jim Shepard, Ren Weschler, Richard Powers Paul Collins, Tom Bissell, and yes, David Shields. And also publishes (sooner or later) books by these authors that seem unpublishable at “big” publishing houses.
Good for them!
– birnbaum (03/28 at 06:30 AM)
This is very interesting. While fiction in the realism vein does use more accurate and believable knowledge and experience, I do like to draw a line at what actually happened and what didn’t. Guess I prefer the old fashioned fiction or nonfiction categories allowing them to have the authorial point of view perception that comes with either.
– susan (03/28 at 07:41 AM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: March 26, 2006
- Filed Under:
Literary Journals
- Comments:2
- Links to this Post: Technorati
