The Day of Atonement

"Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing his praises.

"I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against him."

~~ from Night by Elie Wiesel

Save Chinatown

 

W.D. Clarke

 

W.D. Clarke's White Mythology and She Sang to Them, She Sang are published by Rick Harsch's Corona\Samizdat Press.

election long-form

On the impending election, among other articles, tweets, and asides, I've read The New Yorker's "Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?" and Vanity Fair's James Pogue piece: "Steve Bannon Has Called his 'Army' to Do Battle—No Matter Who Wins in November."

"a good script" in Bedraggling Grandma . . .

"[A]ll of us who try to notice these little human failings assume that Mercier would probably not write a good script, as most readers do not have a good story in them, and by no means a script, and even fewer are the non-readers with any . . . good stories or scripts in them, they can write only fripperies, the upmost shameful insignificances, and this together with Mercier's lack of curiosity and experience would upset . . . any wise person who happened to know that Mercier was about to or intended to write or had already written a script, for this would certainly be another evil act of terrorism on art."

~~ from Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow by Joao Reis

Bernhard's Heidegger

"Heidegger was a philosophical market crier who only brought stolen goods to the market, everything of Heidegger's is second-hand, he was and is the prototype of the re-thinker, who lacked everything, but truly everything, for independent thinking."

~~ from Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard

Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow

 

Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow is a quirky pocketbook full of fathers, donkeys, and waffles.

summerwater

"He grunts and looks out the window. She thinks he's not really all that interested in that book, which looks to be another five-hundred-page lump by another—what's the word—preposterous, propensity, no, the other one, wealthy, well off, ha, prosperous, that's it, another prosperous and preposterous Englishman about how the world is ending because no one is doing what the writer thinks they ought to do, learning obsolete words for insects or scrubbing floors on their hands and knees with wooden brushes or exposing babies to germs, usually something the writer imagines that women or the lower orders did before he was born. She doesn't know why David goes on buying them."

~~ from Summerwater by Sarah Moss

The Creative Writers

The Creative Writers by Gary Amdahl is available wherever books are sold.

 

first edition

A few "as new" copies of Fight for Your Long Day's first edition appear to be floating around the web.

and front

Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

Han Kang covers back

 

Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature

 

best friends forever

Rosa Alexandra Johnson

 

Artist Rosa Alexandra Johnson is open for commissioned work.

Old Masters: A Comedy

 

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters won't disappoint.

Robert Coover

Pricksongs and Descants is the only one I read while he was alive. I believe we discussed "The Babysitter" in a graduate class, and at some later point I saw the film version. The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning are his novels I recall most often browsing in bookstores or libraries, and I cannot say why I was never motivated to read them. Rest in peace, Robert Coover.

*In the evening, a social-media post reminded me of Coover's John's Wife. I remember reading its opening yeas ago in a Borders Bookshop. I was impressed.

September reads

In September, in the first time in forever, I had time and inclination to read substantial portions of Harper's Magazine. I had the August and September issues available and less access to other reading that I typically would. From the September issue, Sheila Heti's "The New Age Bible: On the origins of A Course in Miracles" and Tanya Gold's "My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust Tourism" are particularly good. My August issue reads included William T. Vollmann's "Korean Hearts at the DMZ," and I am just now getting into Ellyn Gaydos's "On Stones: Carving in the Granite Capital of the World."