![]() ![]() ![]() Her recognition of the immense sway certain books hold over us is remarkable, and the essay may or may not have made me tear up a little. But the anxiety of influence has proved more powerful, as has Adams’s inimitable genius. For Zimmerman, reading the Guide was profoundly influential and inspired her to want to write books that could do for others what Adams’s book did for her. A friend pressed me to read Adams’s book years ago, and after a few pages I knew why he’d been so persistent: in addition to being the funniest book I’ve ever read, the Guide puts the everything in the world-including and especially you, the reader-into perspective, albeit a rather frightening and vast perspective, one that, in the book, destroys minds. Dan Piepenbringįrom the cover of Something Will Happen, You’ll See.ĭouglas Adams died fifteen years ago last Wednesday, when I stumbled across a magnificent essay by Jess Zimmerman, written a year ago, about the sizable impact Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had on both her adolescent psyche and her trajectory as a writer (the first was positive the second, less so). Of special note are Knausgaard’s essay “ On the Value of Literature” (“It is surely a meaningless endeavor, an idiotic exertion leading to nothing, and yet it is exquisite, in its own singular way”) a vast series of found photographs from the last century, all of which had been hand-labeled “ ME” by their subjects and “ Spray On,” a drizzly, oblique portfolio from Marilyn Minter that comes alive in the care with which it’s printed. But it’s an art object, not a novelty-the magazine’s luxe production values serve its contents well, giving them a spirit of intrigue that beguiles you into turning the pages. I spent last night with the enormous, lavish new issue of Esopus, which is, at the risk of fetishizing it, a tactile thing: it has fifteen different paper stocks, metallic inks, varnishes, die-cuts, booklets, prints, posters, and other stuff that will fall out if you shake it. My favorite lines are still the ones that feel as though he’s slung his arm around my neck and pulled my cheek close to his as he points to “the small delights” before him: “On that apple tree there’s that fucking cardinal / Who reappears each year, plotting to shit on my car / Before I leave in the morning.” - Caitlin Youngquist From Wittgenstein to Hume, Gottlob Frege to the Battle of Franklin, Koethe braids the philosophical, the mathematical, and the historical, into his verse. ![]() Despite Koethe’s fascination with the prosaic, nearly every line of his lets out the sigh of some existential dilemma. At seventy, Koethe writes mostly of the ordinary things that comprise a lifetime-of “all the little / Accidents that make the days go by,” of “the human shit defining what we are.” Like the cats that live with us until their kidneys fail-“I sing the cat,” he says-or the model trains some of us collect, the great sex we have, the unexpected packages that wait for us on our porches. Under the patter of Sunday’s rain, I read John Koethe’s newest book of poems, The Swimmer. Part rock history, part memoir, it’s so charming, so candid, such a mixture of sweetness and disillusionment and deep fanboy research, that I found myself reading the first four chapters out loud to Sadie-then staying up late, racing to finish, so she could take my copy. - Lorin Stein You don’t have to be a Stones fan to fall in love with Rich Cohen’s The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones. (For that, try Senselessness or The She-Devil in the Mirror.) But its sprays of vituperation are often funny, and even nineteen years on, the book’s atmosphere of exasperated rage feels itchy, jagged, and real. - Robert P. With no plot, no real action, and only the slightest sketch of two characters, Revulsion is barely a novel, and nowhere near its author’s best. The result was a slender, scalding diatribe that brought Moya death threats and infamy. The book-the first English edition of which is forthcoming from New Directions this July-began as an exercise in style, an attempt to ape the unrelenting antagonism of Thomas Bernhard. Horacio Castellanos Moya published Revulsion in 1997, less than a decade after the official end of the Salvadoran civil war. ![]()
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