*<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026there is much in the text that is not made explicit, with the vivid exception of the narrator\u2019s consciousness, in whose eccentric depths we spend the novel immersed. This is part of the book\u2019s perverse brilliance, its sense of good old-fashioned modernist fun.<\/p>\n The extreme subjectivity of the first-person narrative is such that we are given few points of orientation. It\u2019s well over halfway into the novel before we learn that Xavier is a retired private banker who has lost most of his once-considerable wealth, though we are left to wonder how. The effect of this is a kind of intimate disorientation, like looking so closely at a familiar face that you lose the sense of what you\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n All of this might make Big Kiss, Bye-Bye sound somewhat inert, but it is no more inert than consciousness itself, with its odd and ceaseless leaps and circularities. Bennett\u2019s prose has something of the energy of Samuel Beckett\u2019s trilogy.<\/p>\n Like Beckett\u2019s lonely and dyspeptic codgers, Bennett\u2019s narrator has about her a brittle dreaminess; she obsessively circles around the past in a manner both drifting and oddly determined. And if, when Wide Sargasso Sea comes up in the email exchange between the narrator and her old English teacher, the reader feels nudged to think of Jean Rhys, it\u2019s a comparison that is neither unreasonable nor unearned.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThe novel contains many such moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving. To call Big Kiss, Bye-Bye entertaining would be to do an injustice to its discomfiting depth, but reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Mark O\u2019Connell on Claire-Louise Bennett\u2019s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye<\/strong><\/a> (The New York Times Book Review<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cMost people remember the sex in I Love Dick; I remember the class. Chris Kraus\u2019s legendary 1997 autofiction chronicles her love letters to a man she was obsessed with\u2014a game of desire whose voltage came from real asymmetries of class, capital, and access.<\/p>\n From that view, Kraus\u2019s new book, The Four Spent the Day Together, is another genius twist of the knife rather than a departure from her past works. It\u2019s billed (brilliantly and misleadingly) as a true-crime novel, but by the time you get to the shocking crime with which it culminates, countless others of varying scales have piled up. Most overt is the sweeping nationwide crime of rural impoverishment; then there are the endless tiny, daily injustices that result. If genre-faithful true crime seeks sense in motive, Kraus is seeking those senseless systems that both produce violence and strip it of meaning.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIn the opening scene of the book, four-year-old Catt discovers wordplay when her father makes a small joke\u2014\u2019an ice toy\u2019 becomes \u2018a nice toy\u2019\u2014and \u2018she smiled, the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy.\u2019 Catt may not be set up for money, but she\u2019ll have a life of the mind.\u00a0The kids of Balsam are not rolling the candy of language in their mouths. Kraus ends with an appendix of messages the murderers exchanged leading up to the crime\u2026These texts are not rich text. They\u2019re poor text. They don\u2019t lend themselves to the illuminating, associative analysis Kraus is so gifted at. She has to let them speak\u2014or not speak\u2014for themselves. In I Love Dick, Kraus asked: \u2018Is poverty the absence of association?\u2019 She meant association in terms of social relations, but also in terms of language. The drugged murderers are disassociated in every sense. What a fucking tragedy. What a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Elvia Wilk on Chris Kraus\u2019 The Four Spent the Day Together<\/strong><\/a> (4Columns<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cBorn in 1924, Baldwin discomforted the old believers, the black generation that had perfected the mask, much evolved since it was called upon to grin and lie. He dispensed with the mask. It constricted how swiftly he wanted his thoughts to move across the page. Language was a solution to a formal problem, the articulation of consciousness. His voice never aged, the cat on the caf\u00e9 terrace staring down the moon when all the squares have gone to bed. For all his keenness of observation and sympathy for the people whose lives he knew or could imagine so well, his was not the voice of a generation. He belonged entirely to himself.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cHe was beyond control, was, finally, his own jurisdiction, but it took some getting there. Seemingly every step in his life is reconsidered in Nicholas Boggs\u2019s moving biography, Baldwin: A Love Story. Boggs has immersed himself in Baldwin\u2019s novels, stories, plays, poems, and essays, published and unpublished; he has absorbed his available letters and journals, the correspondence from friends and editors, as well as the exhausting amount of writing about Baldwin, the articles, the reviews of his work, the critical studies, interviews in print and on camera, and conducted his own significant interviews with those informants who were still around when he was engaged in his research. Moreover, previous biographies of Baldwin, perhaps because they were written by people who knew him, David Leeming the most intimately, become his collaborators. They hand off the baton to Boggs and he goes the distance, because people now want to know everything about James Baldwin. He has come to that.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThough Boggs writes of how the autobiographical expands to a wider focus in Baldwin\u2019s novels, he nevertheless devotes considerable attention to the connections he can make between Baldwin\u2019s life and his work, the \u2018animating relationship between autobiography and fiction,\u2019 the people and events he was thinking of, what he was setting off from.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cMost importantly, Boggs is out to counter the story of Baldwin\u2019s writing life as one of decline in his later years. He wants him to end not in disappointment or irrelevance but with the Legion of Honor. He sees Baldwin\u2019s novels as achievements comparable to his essays. Therefore he is always on the side of Baldwin\u2019s intentions. That not everything by a great writer need be great is beside the point here, even if it\u2019s something to keep in mind when talking about Baldwin.<\/p>\n \u2013Darryl Pinckney on Nicholas Boggs\u2019 Baldwin: A Love Story<\/strong><\/a> (New York Review of Books<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cWhen a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade,\u00a0there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is\u00a0Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of\u00a0her second novel, 2015\u2019s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft. The publication was also surrounded by controversy over whether the aged Lee, by then seriously disabled, had really consented to its publication.<\/p>\n This new book, The Land of Sweet Forever, is a much more conventional enterprise: a collection of Lee\u2019s unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. No\u00a0deception is being practised here, and\u00a0if people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren\u2019t diehard fans.<\/p>\n The short stories, written in Lee\u2019s youth, are all badly underdeveloped. Most fail to work even as vignettes. One centres on trying to find a place to\u00a0unload a truck in Manhattan; another on a temporary change to\u00a0the\u00a0way the doxology is sung in a\u00a0Methodist church. A slender piece about the quirks of New York movie audiences is categorised as a story, but feels more like a newspaper sketch. The young Lee seems to have little sense of what a story is.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIf we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But it\u2019s more properly seen\u2014and will surely be\u00a0read\u2014for the light it sheds on Lee\u2019s life. As such, it\u2019s obliquely fascinating, largely because it radiates repression. Often there\u2019s a sense that we\u2019re seeing the side of Harper Lee<\/a> that wasn\u2019t exceptional, but representative of a generation of women who were mostly muzzled. Again and again, the narration is choked off just when things begin to get challenging. The\u00a0gender nonconformity of the protagonists\u2014all thinly disguised versions of Lee\u2014is often obvious but never explicitly mentioned. The conventionally cheery tone is almost a\u00a0hostile presence, drowning out and censoring Lee\u2019s real thoughts. Beneath the surface, we often feel the stubborn surging of the excluded. Lee writes in \u2018The Cat\u2019s Meow\u2019: \u2018I suppose a lot of people like me have mastered the first lesson of living at home these days: if you don\u2019t agree with what you hear, place your tongue between your teeth and bite hard.\u2019 We feel those painfully gritted teeth on every page of this book. In a time of rising censorship, it\u2019s salutary to be reminded that an author as important as Harper Lee came so close to being entirely silenced.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Sandra Newman on Harper Lee\u2019s The Land of Sweet Forever<\/strong><\/a> (The Guardian<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cThe cover of A Wooded Shore is a photograph of a white cabin cruiser powering across smooth water with a single figure standing at the stern. It\u2019s a beautiful day, but something is wrong. The bow is cut off, and the color is washed out, faded, with something sad about it, like an old family Polaroid you recognize but can\u2019t quite place. Then it hits you. In every one of these Thomas McGuane stories, something is going to be very wrong and yet probably hilarious\u2014existential slapstick in ventriloquial voices with such precise language and restraint that his sentences will literally shine up off the page.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cLike his 2018 comprehensive story collection, Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories, A Wooded Shore is about Montana the way Dubliners is about Ireland\u2014that is, about nothing less than the human condition and, especially in McGuane\u2019s hands, the strangeness in the ways lives turn out. \u2018Not Here You Don\u2019t\u2019 is relentlessly funny even as it is about loss, depression, and rattlesnakes. In \u2018Thataway,\u2019 he zigzags through offbeat plots with surgical language, tracing the branching storylines of an elderly woman\u2019s death and the fallout on her family, especially her sister who has never left their impoverished town, and her brother, a marginal cowboy actor turned furniture-store tycoon who is forced to return to his hometown by his investigative filmmaker daughter.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cBeginning in the 1970s, I edited dozens of McGuane pieces at a number of magazines, mostly just hooking paragraphs and admiring his tight control of language, humor, and what one critic called his mastery of \u2018macho angst,\u2019 whatever that was. He enjoyed \u2018long reaches\u2019 like the one between being nominated for a National Book Award (Ninety-two in the Shade) and winning the team roping (\u2018I like to get a leetle loaded and rope horned cattle\u2019) at the small local rodeo in Gardiner the same year (1974). This time, opening the digital galley, like every time I opened one of his pieces, or stories, or emails even, there was the excitement that I was in for something special, except that now his long reach is anchored by this further proof that there is no better writer than Thomas McGuane.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Terry McDonell on Thomas McGuane\u2019s A Wooded Shore<\/strong><\/a> (Alta<\/a>)<\/p>\n Like this:<\/p>\n Like Loading…<\/p>\n![\"Big](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/e89b87f5f18ce1467225a03b431ed7c5-199x300.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/85c683dd2031b5981741ea3b79ec7b7f-194x300.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Baldwin\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/9780374721343-220x300.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/0cffcd859b97cfa1d908d784d3163dd5-197x300.gif\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/7aedacd9a07228337ff519fc109aba39-199x300.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n