Alex Kudera's Blog, page 16

first edition

A few "as new" copies of Fight for Your Long Day's first edition appear to be floating around the web.

and front

 

Han Kang covers back

 

Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature

 

Rosa Alexandra Johnson

 

Artist Rosa Alexandra Johnson is open for commissioned work.

Old Masters: A Comedy

 

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters won't disappoint.

Robert Coover

Pricksongs and Descants is the only one I read while he was alive. I believe we discussed "The Babysitter" in a graduate class, and at some later point I saw the film version. The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning are his novels I recall most often browsing in bookstores or libraries, and I cannot say why I was never motivated to read them. Rest in peace, Robert Coover.

September reads

In September, in the first time in forever, I had time and inclination to read substantial portions of Harper's Magazine. I had the August and September issues available and less access to other reading that I typically would. From the September issue, Sheila Heti's "The New Age Bible: On the origins of A Course in Miracles" and Tanya Gold's "My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust Tourism" are particularly good. My August issue reads included William T. Vollmann's "Korean Hearts at the DMZ," and I am just now getting into Ellyn Gaydos's "On Stones: Carving in the Granite Capital of the World."

Bellow's Rosenfeld

"I liked your [Isaac] Rosenfeld lecture very much. I agreed with most of it. Perhaps I would not write to you about Isaac even if I were not running because I am still thinking about his life, his character, his thoughts and his death and am not yet ready to discuss him. But I will say this: He combined all the reticence and shyness of a small sickly Jewish boy from Chicago with heroic ideas about destiny. And after all, history would not have been history without these apparently timid and inconspicuous Jewish children."

~~ Saul Bellow to Mark Schechner, September 30, 1975

Bellow's Cheever

"Will I read your book? Will I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet? I am longing to read the galleys. Since I have to go to New York this weekend, and also to Princeton to see my son Adam playing Antonio, the heavy in The Tempest, I shall get Harriet Wasserman of Russell and Volkening to obtain a set of galleys for me from Knopf. I would like to see you too, but I don't know when I will be free from this mixture of glory and horror. But I will write to you pronto about the book, which I am sure to read with the greatest pleasure."

~~ from Saul Bellow to John Cheever, November 10, 1976