Alex Kudera's Blog, page 8

new books

April 15 was publication day for Mia Kang's collection of poems, All Empires Must; Heather Christle's memoir, In the Rhododendrons; and Andrew Porter's novel, The Imagined Life.

Young Man Luther II

"She quoted liberally from two books by Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther and Gandhi's Truth, and then, in an incredible act of generosity spurred by her recognition of me as a genius . . ., gave me her copies [which] were underlined and annotated to the point where the pages were blackened and bloodied with her thoughts."

~~ from Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl

Young Man Luther

It was only weeks ago that I'd retrieved my copy of Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther from my storage space; at that point, I'd been separated from the mass market paperback by seventeen years. This past week, thusly, when I ran across a sighting of it on page 173 of Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl, I felt reunited again with Erikson's psychoanalytical portrait of a young man; it was one of my favorite assigned readings during my first year of college, one of the greatest reading years of my life. Other writers on that year's history list included Herodotus, Thucydides, Peter Laslett, Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson, and Edmund Wilson. Wilson's To the Finland Station remains one of the most gripping books I've ever read.

small obligations and petty worries

"Oh how I let things pass in those days. I was becoming well known as a hot-head and my instinct urged me unmistakably to never let them think they understood me or could predict my behavior. It did not occur to me then that I would consequently never be trusted. No. It was far more important that I never be trapped by small obligations and petty worries."

~~ from Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl

tornado warnings and thunderstorms

There were thunderstorms, tornadoes, and flood warnings on the night I finished Roberto Arlt's The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers—a novel of the year 1929; even as I had completed this one long journey, I considered what I might read next. 

the hour of your end is nearing

"'Listen to what Ezekial says: "Destruction will come, and they will seek peace and there will be none." And this other: "The time is coming, the day approaching, let not the buyer rejoice or the seller mourn, because his wrath is upon all multitudes." That is also from the prophet Ezekial. You can muck about all you want, but the hour of your end is nearing; I'm telling you this from the heart."

~~ from The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt

John Domini

This past week, f iction writer and literary critic John Domini passed on.

March 10, 2025 print issue

The New Yorker's March 10 print issue includes three engrossing articles: Nathan Heller's "As Harvard Goes: The struggle for the soul of the university"; Michael Luo's "Tragedy at Rock Springs: Unearthing a gruesome episode of racial terror"; and Nick Paumgarten's "Dreams and Nightmares: A fan's notes on Super Bowl week." I'm on the Jennifer Wilson piece from the March 17 print issue now.

The Unknown

It's behind a paywall for anyone who has read their "free articles," but I believe that Jeffrey Goldberg's "The Unknown" is the engrossing article I read early in the twenty-first century.

I wanted to be important

"When I was coming of age, writers such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were titans. Like my ambitious father, I wanted to be important. Yet in my latter career, novelists have been precipitously demoted. Even Jonathan Franzen isn’t Jonathan Franzen any more. Nowadays, the most any of us litfic types can hope for is a Netflix option."

~~ from Lionel Shriver's "Don't Write Off Literary Fiction Just Yet"