the hour of your end is nearing

"'Listen to what Ezekial says: "Destruction will come, and they will seek peace and there will be none." And this other: "The time is coming, the day approaching, let not the buyer rejoice or the seller mourn, because his wrath is upon all multitudes." That is also from the prophet Ezekial. You can muck about all you want, but the hour of your end is nearing; I'm telling you this from the heart."

~~ from The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt

John Domini

This past week, talented fiction writer and literary critic John Domini passed on.

March 10, 2025 print issue

The New Yorker's March 10 print issue includes three engrossing articles: Nathan Heller's "As Harvard Goes: The struggle for the soul of the university"; Michael Luo's "Tragedy at Rock Springs: Unearthing a gruesome episode of racial terror"; and Nick Paumgarten's "Dreams and Nightmares: A fan's notes on Super Bowl week." I'm on the Jennifer Wilson piece from the March 17 print issue now.

The Unknown

It's behind a paywall for anyone who has read their "free articles," but I believe that Jeffrey Goldberg's "The Unknown" is the engrossing article I read early in the twenty-first century.

I wanted to be important

"When I was coming of age, writers such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were titans. Like my ambitious father, I wanted to be important. Yet in my latter career, novelists have been precipitously demoted. Even Jonathan Franzen isn’t Jonathan Franzen any more. Nowadays, the most any of us litfic types can hope for is a Netflix option."

~~ from Lionel Shriver's "Don't Write Off Literary Fiction Just Yet" 

affordable copies available online

At eBay, we found affordable new copies of Auggie's Revenge as well as fine or near fine copies of the first edition of Fight for Your Long Day. Other sellers offer new and used copies of each novel.

some kind of weirdo

"I look at him in shock, realizing that I had given myself in marriage to some kind of weirdo."

~~ from The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt

lawns

"Spring had finally come and I had begun the first mowings of the lawns of my family's neighborhood. Lawns now, I know, are mown by small businessmen, even by subsidiary companies of large corporations, but in 1968 boys mowed lawns, If they were hard-working, or saving money to buy some big-ticket item, they mowed many lawns."

~~ from Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl

Kaufmann Nietzsches

The Kudera Nietzsches

 

I'm Still Here

I've seen I'm Still Here and A Complete Unknown.