A revelatory meditation on reading, writing, and editing.
A celebration of a favorite writer deepens into an unexpectedly complex and ambivalent response.
Evenson (Critical Studies/CalArts; The Warren, 2016, etc.) first read Carver’s classic collection of minimalist fiction when he was an 18-year-old student intent on learning to write fiction himself. He wasn’t well-versed in Carver’s contemporaries, so he came to him from an unorthodox direction: “I had Beckett and Kafka as models for what I hoped literature could do,” he writes. “Which probably made me see Carver in a very eccentric light.” Adding to the eccentricity of the experience was the fact that Evenson was a Mormon and therefore abstained from alcohol, which fueled almost all of these stories and was such a struggle for Carver. Yet Evenson’s close readings proved profoundly influential, as he felt that Carver’s stories had “a productive ambiguity that stimulates a creative energy that keeps them active and alive in a way that books more insistent on ‘meaning something’ don’t manage.” Seeing Carver’s seminal fiction through Evenson’s eyes will bring readers back to the work fresh. Then things get trickier. Like the rest of the literary world, Evenson discovered just how aggressively editor Gordon Lish had refocused these stories, in some cases cutting as much as 80 percent from Carver’s original manuscript. As Carver moved away from the severity of such minimalism and published more detailed versions of some of these stories, Evenson thought that the new versions “felt less like the Carver I knew and more like stories that didn’t have his distinctive imprint.” Further complicating the issue is the fact that Evenson would subsequently have some ambivalent experiences with Lish as his editor and some stonewalling from the Carver estate while researching a piece on the Lish-Carver relationship. The author leaves no question that he remains grateful for the stories as he first encountered them and prefers them to the versions Carver favored, yet he identifies with how the author felt like an “imposter.”
A revelatory meditation on reading, writing, and editing.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63246-061-5
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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