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The Beastly Beatitudes of Donald B.
James Wolcott looks at how Donald Barthelme’s antic fiction influenced a generation of
post-postmodernists.
Excerpts from David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America and Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas.
One More Round
In a trio of novels, Patrick Hamilton offered deft portraits of the English working class as World War II descended. Their republication introduces us to the odd, booze-drenched world of a terrific
British writer.
Also Featured:
Richard Locke on PAT BARKER’s Life Class
Sarah Kerr on MICHAEL POLLAN’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
James Gibbons on SUSAN CHOI’s A Person of Interest
Steven G. Kellman on A. L. KENNEDY’s Day
Gerald Early on RANDALL KENNEDY’s Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal
Peter Terzian on WILLIAM MAXWELL’s Early Novels and Stories
James Surowiecki on HA-JOON CHANG’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Jed Rasula on DARREN WERSHLER-HENRY and LORI EMERSON’s The Alphabet Game: A
bpNichol Reader
Sven Birkerts on KNUT HAMSUN’s Hunger and Growth of the Soil
PLUS: Alexander Waugh on drinking the Kingsley Amis way; Drake Stutesman on Elias Khoury’s Yalo; Nick Tosches on the books George Steiner didn’t write; an interview with Jerome Charyn; reviews of titles by Ceridwen Dovey, Charles Bock, Julio Cortazan, Jay Wright, Max Kozloff, and Tony D’Souza; Hazel Rowley on the valiant fight of Paris’s Village Voice bookstore to stay alive; and much more in fiction, art, and culture.
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