POSTMODERNISM AS LIBERTY VALANCE: NOTES ON AN EXECUTION
THE RITUAL KILLING OF POSTMODERN LITERATURE IS A THREE-MAN GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (ALLEGORICALLY SPEAKING)
Finding a lot of resonances and curiosities in this collection that I’d like to recommend – a fruitful pattering of words to engage – I especially have liked the introduction (can’t find pdf of online) and then I thought the midsection of the essay linked above (click anywhere on the opening titles to read) was strong and productive.
Never read any of his fiction, but he likes Bolano which is enough of a recommendation. Any you would suggest from the novels he’s written?
i don’t make it through much of them – but did find Motherless Brooklyn compelling
Cheers
I also like Bolano much. Lethem likes the whole family of writers I love and his nonfiction and essays are quite stimulating. This book (“Ecstasies of Influence”) has been provoking, interesting, and very well-written all the way through and on very many levels – artistic, compositionally, memoir, cultural and so on. I may look into some more recent fiction of his as well – some wonderful allegorical-type work included in “Ecstasies.”
Seeing this post brought me right back to a coffee shop in a town I was vacationing in last winter while I read it. A very pleasant, engaging book that seems to have survived in my mind for a year now at least.
i agree – pleasant and engaging is a great way to put it – i find some tangly ideas handled with delightfully compressed complexity and then breezy memoir-like passages that resonate.