How He Came to be Nowhere
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My Father’s Life
Leonard Michaels
‘Six days a week he rose early, dressed, ate breakfast alone, put on his hat, and walked to his barbershop at 207 Henry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about half a mile from our apartment.’
Nuclear Arms And The Fate Of The Earth
Jonathan Schell
‘We have lived in the shadow of nuclear arms for more than thirty-six years, so it does not seem too soon for us to familiarize ourselves with them - to acquaint ourselves with such matters as the ‘thermal pulse’, the ‘blast wave’, and the ‘three stages of radiation sickness.’’
Fifty-Seven Views of Fujiyama
Guy Davenport
‘So Sora, to be worthy of the beauty of the world, shaved his head the day we departed, and donned a wandering priest’s black robe, and took yet a third name, Sogo, which means Enlightened, for the road.’
The End of A Gentleman’s Profession
John Sutherland
‘It is convenient to think of fiction threading through four frames on its way to existence.’
Sweat Shop Labour
David Caute
‘The aim is to coax the writer out of the isolation which keeps one end of the publishing industry comfortably in the nineteenth century.’
Poetry and The Poetry Business
Blake Morrison
‘If there is one image that has dominated our notion of English poetry since 1945 it is that of restraint.’
A Hand Made Art
Per Gedin
‘This new kind of ‘planned’ best-seller invariably influences every other form of book production, most notably that of the book selling.’
David Godine | Interview
Eric Burns
‘David R. Godine is a respected, adventurous, outspoken publisher and a soi-disant cultural elitist.’
But Why Write? The Writer-To-Be
Walter Abish
‘How to explain this resolve to write, this firm unwavering intent to become a writer on the part of someone who may not even really care for books?’
Lucy
Lisa Zeidner
‘I needed to sit on two dictionaries to reach the piano, which was respectable, black and dimly European.’
The Drawer
Nicole Ward Jouve
‘A husband was a leech. Sucked, sucked your substance, and no feedback ever, and where were you to refuel?’
Let Me Count The Times
Martin Amis
‘Vernon made love to his wife three and a half times a week, and this was all right.’
Sherry Fine: Conceptualist
Kenneth Bernard
‘When Jimmy Dellapiccolo first met her, she was in a SoHo gallery masturbating.’
Vitamins
Raymond Carver
‘I worked a few hours a night for the hospital. It was a nothing job. I did some work, signed the card for eight hours, went drinking with the nurses.’
La Orgía Perpetua: An Essay on Sexuality and Realism
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘No character has been more persistently and passionately present than Emma Bovary.’
The Beauty Disease
Patricia Hampl
‘Beauty, for my grandmother and my aunts, was divided like a territory into estates, each part governed by a different seignior.’
Introduction: The End of the English Novel
Bill Buford
‘The novel has always smacked of inadequacies.’
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
‘He resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man.’
An extract from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Southern Birds
Desmond Hogan
‘She was like a nun who wanted her body for herself but being generous gave it freely.’
A Scream of Toys
Alan Sillitoe
‘Edie looked a long time at blue sky in a pool of water after rain before dipping her finger down for a taste.’
Alice fell
Emma Tennant
‘Agony belonged to night and would take advantage of the union, increase the whirligig of pain.’
Riddley Walker
Russell Hoban
‘Ther leader he wer a big black and red spottit dog he come forit a littl like he ben going to make a speach or some thing’.
Invasion from Outsiders
Lorna Sage
‘It seems necessary to say at the outset that I find the English novel a problematic entity, difficult to be properly sensible about.’
The Uneasy Middleground of British Fiction
Chris Bigsby
‘The English novel has for far too long been regarded as a cosily provincial’.
An Irrelevant Parochialism
Frederick Bowers
‘What strikes an ex-patriate most about the contemporary British novel is its conformity, its traditional sameness, and its realistically rendered provincialism.’
Taking Risks
James Gindin
‘Transatlantic literary critical lenses are no more immune from distortion than are any others.’
Where Do We Go from Here?
Christine Brooke-Rose
‘This consciousness that is to wrap the planet seems to me dangerously like the pollution that may stifle it.’
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
George Steiner
‘At moments Hitler’s head brushed against Gideon’s cheek like a clump of wet leaves.’
B-ABEL
Jeremy Lane
‘Partial, our protagonist, to the palatal; prone, too, to the plosive; and apt, you’ve heard, to alliterate.’
Science Fiction to Superfiction
Jerome Klinkowitz & Thomas Remington
‘In terms of their readership, science fiction and traditional literature have rarely shared comfortable company.’
