Xmas, Jamaica Plain
Sort by:
Lucky Pierre and the Coldwater Flat
Robert Coover
‘Projections run riot, mirrors tip and weave, there’s a blur of images like film jumping out of its sprockets.’
Bachelor Life
M.J. Fitzgerald
‘At nine o’clock the man leaves the flat dressed in an elegant salmon-pink dress’.
Sweet Truth
Walter Abish
‘I believe in the harmony of my friendship to Gisela rather than in the binding force that the institution of marriage is said to represent.’
The Wife
David Katz
‘Ever notice the change that comes over / your gentle wife the minute she sets / foot in a grocery store?’
City of Dis: The Fiction of Don DeLillo
Norman Bryson
‘It has been his fate to be imminent for what is by now an unconscionably long time.’
The Weightless Characters of William Styron
Robert Boyers
‘The belief in free will is necessary to most good fiction.’
Prose Feature: John Barth
Bill Buford & Pete de Bolla
‘Barth is the comedian of forms, the controlled anarchist who deals realities, roles and fictions like playing cards, inventing – as in a game – an endless succession of names for the world.’
John Barth | Interview
John Barth
‘Everything we do in art is likely to turn out to be either prophecy or exorcism, whatever its other intentions.’
On the Death of Elizabeth Bishop
Don Guttenplan
‘Her grace, acuity, and easy command of language make Elizabeth Bishop’s writing a delight to both the mind and the ear.’
New American Writing: Introduction
Bill Buford & Pete de Bolla
‘It is increasingly a discomforting commonplace that today’s British novel is neither remarkable nor remarkably interesting.’
Interview with Theodore Solotaroff
Theodore Solotaroff & William Warner
‘People belong to literary movements which are abstractions rather than to ways of life which are concrete.’
The Universal Fears
John Hawkes
‘He was most seriously injured, as it turned out, not in the groin or flanks or belly, but in the head.’
The First Winter of My Married Life
William Gass
‘Our ears were soon as sensitive as a skinless arm, and we spoke in whispers, registered the furtive drip of remote taps.’
from Son of the Morning
Joyce Carol Oates
‘The livingness of the rifle and the bullet and the death spasm and his own bright quickening blood: never would he forget.’
Present Imperfect: a Note on the Work of Walter Abish
Tony Tanner
‘To be born is to be born into a circuit of permissions and prohibitions, which constitutes the discourse (in the widest sense) of that particular culture’.
Chuckle or Gasp: a Note on the Work of Leonard Michaels
Marc Granetz
‘The best writers are known by their voices’.
Orgy, hors-je, hors-jeu: a Note on the Work of James Purdy
Norman Bryson
‘Reviews can be a little like antibodies.’
The Men’s Club
Leonard Michaels
‘The night of the meeting I told my wife I’d be home before midnight.’
Requa-I
Tillie Olsen
‘Night scratched at the window and seeped from the room corners. No other sound but rising river wind.’
The New Music
Donald Barthelme
‘Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act.’
The Wor(l)ds of William Gass
D.D. Guttenplan
‘Ah, what bliss to be a word. Cool and shimmering in blue or black on a white page as pristine and inviting as any world before the first day of creation.’
John Cheever in the Bourgeois Tradition
Jonathan Levi
‘For John Cheever, all gall is divided into three parts.’
Jonathan Levi on The Stories of John Cheever.
Updike’s Nabokov
John Dugdale
‘The influence of Nabokov can be recognized throughout American fiction of the last two decades . . . but The Coup is the first time to my knowledge that this dominance has been thematized.’
from The Franchiser
Stanley Elkin
‘In sickness he understood what he never had in health, that his body, anyone’s, everyone’s, was something for the public record.’
from Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues
Ronald Sukenick
‘when rising expectations hit the upcoming decline hell was going to break loose it was already starting to break loose’
Unguided Tour
Susan Sontag
‘The more that places, customs, the circumstances of adventures are changed, the more we see that we amidst them are unchanging.’
