FBR 95: What's crawling across the desk . . .

The second installment of Dots and Dashes finds me with a couple of new items of interest. Last night Jonathan Safran Foer was the honoree at a reception at a local library; his latest book was chosen as the town's "One Town, One Book" program. I attended with a fresh copy of one of his novels in hand and left with it signed. I have not read Foer, but, well, you don't pass these things up when they are so close. I asked him if he taught somewhere. Yes, he said. NYU.

Today, I've been reading about Saul Bellow's short-lived literary journal The Noble Savage. Its first issue appeared in 1960, and there were only five altogether when it ceased two years later; not a long run, but it got me to thinking about the impulse in writers to start up magazines or journals in the hope of satisfying urges writing fiction can't. The lure of empire, I suppose. Colonization. The gathering instinct, the desire to collect around you a number of like minds. To create a living physical object, a sort of paper salon where you can spend time. The political impulse. To spark social fireworks, perhaps. Dickens and his journals. Ezra Pound's involvement in The Egoist. The glorious story of The Paris Review. Dave Eggers and McSweeney's. Examples are all over the place of novelists and poets on the editorial boards of various serial publications. Bellow wrote that the journal was "a move against the cold, companionless boredom of a writer's life."

In his biography of Bellow, James Atlas describes the air of creative excitement at the start up, and the later inevitable editorial squabbles, and I searched to see if any of the contributions are available (the first issue featured work by Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Jules Feiffer, and others). It turns out that original copies of The Noble Savage are available from rare-book sellers. I ordered a first issue for $4.95 plus shipping. Can't wait to read something by Herbert Gold called "How to Tell the Beatniks from the Hipsters."

There is, by the way, a nice bibliographic piece about the journal by Jim Burns on the web at http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/prose...

Finally, I am reading William Lychack's handsome new collection, The Architect of Flowers, a slim gathering of haunting little stories. There is a place conjured in these tales that is quiet and quietly dangerous. As readers we struggle with each new text to find our way through it, hoping we can latch on to something normal, find our balance, and not be upended. Lychack isn't going to let you come away so easily. The first story, "Stolpestad," is a second-person monologue about a policeman called to put down an injured dog. You grope your way through the narrative as in a fog of limited visibility, and everything seems a little off. How much more than a little off, you don't understand until the story veers into a breathless conversation between the cop and the father of the boy who's dog it is, and how in that simple act something happens that may or may not ever be righted. It is a short book to be savored and, what with my schedule, it's bound to be. Two weeks into it, I am only on the third story. Which is good; that fog has been curling around in the corners of my room since I started it.

This last book, by the way, is an original release in paper. The practice seems to be happening more and more, and I love the trend. Perhaps it's being done with first story collections? I don't know, but Legends of a Suicide by David Vann and The Possessed by Elif Batuman came out last year, both in original paper, and all three are from different publishers. If it means we get to read these things sooner, I'm all for it.