Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 2003: Casebook Study of Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

Unknown, Author

Dalkey Archive Press

Title: The Age of Wire and String( Stories) Binding: Paperback Author: BenMarcus Publisher: DalkeyArchivePress

The Age of Wire and String

Literature & Fiction

BenMarcus

Contemporary

Point Counter Point

<p>The dilettantes who frequent lady tantamounts society parties are determined to push forward the moral frontiers of the age marjorie has left her family to live with walter; walter is in love with the luscious but cold-hearted lucy who devours every man in sight; the repulsive spandrell deflowers young girls for the sake of entertainment and all the while everyone is engaged in dazzling and witty conversation</p>

HUXLEY, ALDOUS

Nicholas Mosley (introduction)

This Whitbread Book of The Year Award winner for 1990 is the final novel of the "Catastrophe Practice" series. Set in the 1920s and 30s it tells the story of two young radicals, Max and Eleanor, who meet, love, separate and come together again during the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War.

Hopeful monsters: A novel

Nicholas Mosley

The (Diblos) Notebook

MERRILL, JAMES

Splendide-Hôtel

Arthur Rimbaud's invented "Splendide-Hotel," "built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night," provides the occasion for Sorrentino's imaginative meditation on letters and language. Each chapter serves as an opportunity for the author to expand on thoughts and images suggested by a letter of the alphabet, as well as to reflect upon the workings of the imagination, particularly in the art of William Carlos Williams and Arthur Rimbaud. Reminiscent of the philosophical treatise/poem "On Being Blue" by William H. Glass, "Splendide-Hotel" is a Grand Hotel of the mind, splendidly conceived.

SORRENTINO, GILBERT

CREELEY, Robert

Literary

United States

Season at Coole

<p>Coole"" is a country, a madhouse, cloud-cuckooland. . . a family. An incredible, disgusting, glorious family of Long Island Irish psychotic drunken dreamers, natural communists and slobs. And this book, a love-hate song to them, becomes an upside-down accordion riff on the whole idea of family or tribe, ethnic and American. The Cooles have imported the rich Irish madness and the two curses of babies and drink (though the younger half of the nine kids prefer grass and acid). There's father Leland, all tyrannous illogic; mother Rose, who lies drunk in the dirty laundry, confessing to the Virgin; Leland Jr., obscenely fat, murderous, pathetic and paranoiac (but in high school ""he could make a leper ring his bell with laughter""); sickly Emmet, skinny alley-cat of the underworld; Sandra-Sam who looks Italian and runs with tattooed hoodlums; and quite a few more. They have gracious Kennedy-family fantasies, they write on the walls, they wet their beds, they have incestuous and homicidal (especially patricidal) fantasies about each other and about their crazy redheaded aunts (nicknamed Quif and Quire). To a man they dream of escape, yet are fatally bound to the house which Mickey Mack, the writer son and eye of the storm, calls ""a museum, literally, of natural history"" -- a kind of inverse, perverse health in the midst of suburban cancer. A bravura novel, funny and wild (or distasteful?) and language is its pole star, language that careens with a mad sweet Irish lilt. ―Kirkus Reviews</p>

Stephens, Michael

Like Melies's film The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza gives us a hero, Desmond, who finds himself caught between two worlds, the night before and the morning after, the past and the present, the world that is and the world that was. First published in Ireland in 1958, this fantastic excursion of the mind, which moves between Dublin and Dundalk on a train headed for the scrap heap after fifty years, also reminds the reader of Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and At Swim-Two-Birds. But while Leopold Bloom is peripatetic in his Dublin Odyssey, Cusack's Desmond locks himself in train carriage 304D and orders out—sandwiches, whiskey, and beer. A brilliant tour de force melding time, place, and memory.

Cadenza

Cusack, Ralph

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