Clifford Garstang's Blog, page 178

Gourevitch to leave Paris Review

The Paris Review announced earlier this month that Philip Gourevitch, editor of the magazine for the past five years, will step down. I only today got around to visiting the website to read the Nov. 6 press release, and it is full of praise for Gourevitch and what he has accomplished during his tenure. What I find very interesting is that he is described as a worthy successor to George Plimpton, the magazine's longtime editor, as if Plimpton had handed the reins to him directly. There is no m...

New (to me) Litmag: Emprise Review

Emprise Review isn't new--the current issue is the magazine's 11th--but I'm just hearing about it. Or maybe I'm just now paying attention, because I know a lot of the names who have appeared in recent numbers. Check it out--I'll be watching now.

New LitMag Reviews

Check out NewPages for some recent reviews of literary magazines. None that I'm in, but I still like to see what's happening in magazines to which I don't subscribe.

Henry IV, Part 1 (again)

When, on Friday morning, I ordered my ticket for the Saturday night performance of American Shakespeare Center's production of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Pt. 1 (which I also saw six weeks ago and discussed here), I was told I was getting the last reserved seat in the house. It's always exciting to see a big crowd at this little theater, so I was looking forward to the show.

It turns out that the reason for the packed house was a group: a reunion of participants from James Madison University's...

The New Yorker: "Indianapolis (Highway 74)" by Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard has a story collection coming out in January, called Day Out of Days, and I get the impression that it's full of road trips. In September, The New Yorker published a story from the collection, "Land of the Living", which I discussed here, and another story, "Thor's Day (Highway 81 North, Staunton, Virginia)," appeared in Zoetrope: All Story this Fall, and I discussed it here. I didn't love either one.

The current story takes place on the bypass around Indianapolis where the narrato...

The Missing Link Project: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I had read parts of this book before, including the title story, which is widely anthologized. I'd also heard the author read the book's final story, "The Lives of the Dead," at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2008. It is a wonderful book, and if you haven't read it I encourage you to do so.

It is a fictional memoir, I suppose. The narrator has a lot in common with the author—name, profession, background, service in Vietnam. And it is impossible for a reader to separate fact from fiction. O...

Holiday Book Fair at Stone Soup

1st Annual Holiday Book Fair featuring Local Authors

Join Stone Soup Books for a little local literary shopping experience with all the trimmings of mulled cider & molasses cookies. Pick up that specially inscribed book gift - local cookbooks, dog books, bird books, local history, or local fiction. Authors will be on hand to write custom gift inscriptions and answer questions. Usher in the spirit of the season with a lovely book from one of our local authors.

I'll be there!

National Book Awards

The National Book Awards were announced tonight at a banquet in New York. In Fiction, the winner was Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin

The Missing Link Project: Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

I first read Jesus's Son in 2000 (it first appeared in 1992) and my reaction at the time was simple: I hated it. What stayed with me over the years was the excessive drug use and the violence. I understand that these things are real and it all seemed authentic enough, but it just didn't appeal to me. Whenever I told people that I didn't like the book, they gave me strange looks, as if I was out of my mind. Earlier in The Missing Link Project some people reacted the same way to my negative com...

The New Yorker: "Alone" by Yiyun Li

I'm not sure what to make of this story. It's skillfully written, but it seems to lack emotion. Or perhaps that's the point? (But then, of course, we'd have an imitative fallacy problem!) Suchen is a U.S. resident, originally from China, but she has put China in her past because of an incident that occurred when she was a girl. She and five other girls had entered into a suicide pact—the reasons aren't clear to Suchen and if she doesn't know, the readers certainly don't know—and carried their...