Khirbet Khizeh

 

This quote is one long run-on sentence. It's Not quite William Faulkner long. But it's got that same architectural integrity. One image becomes one scene; encapsulated in one sentence.Originally written in Hebrew in 1949, it wasn't translated into English until 2008.

"One man, with a prodigious mustache, sat at the edge of the circle patiently rolling a cigarette in his dark peasant hands, transforming the lap of his robe into a tiny workshop for the purpose, gathering up the crumbs of tobacco and packing and tamping them in the trumpet of paper, tapping it this way and that,  fussing with his flint and tinder until it finally produced a glow, which was nurtured with blowing and shielded with the cup of his hand, and lit, raising for his enjoyment a pungent cloud of smoke, demonstrating the last scrap of freedom remaining in his possession, and also some hope for a future, a sort of everything-will-be-alright that someone always kindled through wishful thinking, which he immediately believed in as though it were the first step toward salvation and even infected his neighbors with his good faith —such a fine quality, which was now made all the more pathetic and gullible since you (like the Lord in Heaven, as it were) knew what he did not know yet."

Expanding on that architecture metaphor, that sentence is a high-rise among strip malls. The cigarette becomes an obvious symbol of freedom, then is instantly denigrated as "wishful thinking", it's salvation, and then it's pathetic. There is a whole story arc here, which I can tell you is representative of the whole.

Heinemann Educational Books

In 1957, Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) created the African Writers Series, spearheaded by Alan Hill and West Africa specialist Van Milne, to focus on publishing the writers of Africa such as Chinua Achebe, who was the first advisory editor of the series. Heinemann was awarded the 1992 Worldaware Award for Social Progress. The series was relaunched by Pearson in 2011.

Inspired by the African Writers Series, Leon Comber launched the Writing in Asia Series in 1966 from Singapore. Two Austin Coates books in the series, Myself a Mandarin and City of Broken Promises, became bestsellers, but the series, after publishing more than 70 titles, was to fold in 1984 when Heinemann Asia was taken over by a parent group of publishers. In 1970, the Caribbean Writers Series—modeled on the African Writers Series—was launched by James Currey and others at HEB to republish work by major Caribbean writers.

This list is as of 1986, if their later works are not included. I've also corrected the spelling of Authors names where it seemed relevant.You can see a more another mostly complete list here.

A - L

NUMBER	AUTHOR	TITLE
6	Peter Abrahams	Mine Boy
1	Chinua Achebe	Things Fall Apart
3	Chinua Achebe	No Longer At Ease
16	Chinua Achebe	Arrow of God
31	Chinua Achebe	A Man of the People
100	Chinua Achebe	Girls at War
120	Chinua Achebe	Beware Soul Brother
241	Thomas Akare	The Slums
11	T. M. Aluko	One Man, One Machete
30	T. M. Aluko	One Man, One Wife
32	T. M. Aluko	Kinsman and Foreman
70	T. M. Aluko	Chief, the Honourable Minister
25	Elechi Amadi	The Concubines
44	Elechi Amadi	The Great Ponds
210	Elechi Amadi	The Slave
148	I. N. C. Aniebo	The Anonymity of Sacrifice
206	I. N. C. Aniebo	The Journey Within
253	I. N. C. Aniebo	Of Wives, Talismans and the Dead
261	Kofi Anyidoho	A Harvest of Dreams
43	Ayi Kwei Armah	The Beautiful Ones are not Yet Born
154	Ayi Kwei Armah	Fragments
155	Ayi Kwei Armah	Why are we so Blest?
194	Ayi Kwei Armah	The Healers
218	Ayi Kwei Armah	Two Thousand Seasons
59	Bediako Asare	The Rebel
108	Kofi Awoonor	This Earth, My Brother
260	Kofi Awoonor	Until the Morning After
248	Mariama Ba	So Long a Letter
205	Francis Bebey	The Ashanti Doll
13	Mongo Beti	Mission to Kala
77	Mongo Beti	King Lazarus
88	Mongo Beti	The Poor Christ of Bomba
181	Mongo Beti	Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness
214	Mongo Beti	Remember Ruben
217	Steve Biko	I Write What I Like
147	Okot p'Bitek	The Horn of My Love
193	Okot p'Bitek	Hare and Hornbill
266	Okot p'Bitek	Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol
186	Yaw M. Boateng	The Return
46	Dennis Brutus	Letters to Martha
115	Dennis Brutus	A Simple Lust
208	Dennis Brutus	Stubborn Hope
198	Amilcar Cabral	Unity and struggle
221	Styl Cheney-Coker	The Graveyard also has Teeth
79	Driss Chraibi	Heirs to the Past
50	J. P. Clark	America, Their America
12	William Conton	The African
87	Bernard Dadie	Climbe
125	Daniachew Worku	The Thirteenth Sun
124	Modikwe Dikobe	The Marabi Dance
57	Mbella Sonne Dipoko	Because of Women
107	Mbella Sonne Dipoko	Black and White in Love
41	Amu Djoleto	The Strange Man
168	T. Obinkaram Echewa	The Land's Lord
2	Cyprian Ekwensi	Burning Grass
5	Cyprian Ekwensi	People of the City
19	Cyprian Ekwensi	Lokotown
84	Cyprian Ekwensi	Beautiful Feathers
146	Cyprian Ekwensi	Jagua Nana
172	Cyprian Ekwensi	Restless City
185	Cyprian Ekwensi	Survive the Peace
227	Buchi Emecheta	The Joys of Motherhood
10	Olaudah Equiano	Equaino's Travels
80	Nuruddin Farah	From a Crooked Rib
184	Nuruddin Farah	A Naked Needle
226	Nuruddin Farah	Sweet and Sour Milk
252	Nuruddin Farah	Sardines
20	Mungo Gatheru	Child of Two Worlds
223	Fathy Ghanem	The Man Who Lost his Shadow
177	Nadine Gordimer	Some Monday for Sure
166	Joe De Graft	Beneath the Jazz and Brass
264	Joe De Graft	Muntu
101	Bessie Head	Maru
149	Bessie Head	A Question of Power
182	Bessie Head	The Collector of Treasures
220	Bessie Head	Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind
60	Luis Bernardo Honwana	We Killed the Mangy-Dog
228	Taha Hussein	An Egyptian Childhood
209	Ysuf Idris	The Cheapest Nights
267	Ysuf Idris	Rings of Burnished Brass
18	Obotunde Ijmere	The Imprisonment of Obatala
189	Eddie Iroh	Forty-Eight Guns for the General
213	Eddie Iroh	Toads of War
255	Eddie Iroh	The Siren in the Night
231	Kenjo Jumbam	The White Man of God
24	Aubrey Kachingwe	No Easy Task
158	Samuel Kahiga	The Girl from Abroad
119	Cheikh Hamidou Kane	Ambigious Adventure
4	Kenneth Kaunda	Zambia Shall be Free
162	Legson Kayira	The Detainee
157	A. W. Kayper-Mensah	The Drummer in our Time
219	Jomo Kenyatta	Facing Mount Kenya
40	Asare Konadu	A Woman in her Prime
55	Asare Konadu	Ordained by the Oracle
239	Ahmadou Kourouma	The Suns of Independance
211	Mazisi Kunene	Emperor Shaka the Great
234	Mazisi Kunene	Anthem of the Decades
235	Mazisi Kunene	The Ancestors
35	Alex La Guma	A Walk in the Night
110	Alex La Guma	In the Fog of the Seasons End
212	Alex La Guma	Time of the Burcherbird
251	Hugh Lewin	Bandiet
69	Taban Lo Liyong	Fixions
74	Taban Lo Liyong	Eating Chiefs
90	Taban Lo Liyong	Frantz Fannon's Uneven Ribs

  M-Z

NUMBER	AUTHOR	TITLE
137	Yulisa Amadu Maddy	No Past, No Present, No Future
225	Naguib Mafouz	Children of Gebelawi
123	Nelson Mandela	No Easy Walk to Freedom
236	Jack Mapanje	Of Chameleons and Gods
207	Dambudzo Marechera	The House of Hunger
237	Dambudzo Marechera	Black Sunlight
97	Ali A Mazrui	The Trial of Christipher Okigbo
81	Tom Mboya	The Challenge of Nationhood Speeches
229	Thomas Mofolo	Chaka
98	Dominic Mulaisho	The Tongue of the Dumb
204	Dominic Mulaisho	The Smoke that Thunders
21	John Munonye	The Only Son
45	John Munonye	Obi
94	John Munonye	Oil Man of Obange
153	John Munonye	A Dancer of Fortune
195	John Munonye	Bridge to a Wedding
159	Martha Mvungi	Thee Solid Stones
143	Meja Mwangi	Kill me Quick
145	Meja Mwangi	Carcase for Hounds
176	Meja Mwangi	Gang Down River Road
160	George Simeon  Mwase	Strike a Blow and Die
262	John Nagenda	The Seasons of Thomas Tebo
7	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	Weep Not Child
17	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	The River Between
36	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	A Grain of Wheat
51	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	The Black Hermit
150	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	Secret Lives
188	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	Petals of Blood
200	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	Devil on the Cross
240	Ngugi Wa Thiong'o	Detained
191	Ngugi & Micere Mugo	The Trial of Dedan Kimathi
246	Ngugi & Ngugi Wa Miri	I Will Marry When I Want
203	Rebeka Njau	Ripples in the Pool
67	Nkem Nwankwo	Danda
173	Nkem Nwankwo	My Mercedes is Bigger Than Yours
26	Flora Nwapa	Efuru
56	Flora Nwapa	Idu
233	S. Nyamfukudza	The Non-Beleiver's Journey
85	Onuora Nzekwu	Wand of Noble Wood
249	Olusegun Obasanjo	My Commands
38	Oginga Odinga	Not Yet Uhuru
68	Gabriel Okara	The Voice
183	Gabriel Okara	The Fishermans's Invocation
62	Christopher Okigbo	Labryinths
122	Kole Omotoso	The Combat
63	Sembene Ousmane	God's Bits of Wood
92	Sembene Ousmane	The Money-Order
175	Sembene Ousmane	Xala
250	Sembene Ousmane	The Last Bit of Empire
99	Yambo Ouologuem	Bound to Violence
29	Ferdinand Oyono	Houseboy
39	Ferdinand Oyono	The Old Man amd the Medal
201	Sol T. Plaatje	Mhudi
269	Pepetela	Mayombe
178	R. L. Peteni	Hill of Fools
22	Lenrie Peters	The Second Round
37	Lenrie Peters	Satellites
238	Lenrie Peters	Selected Poetry
258	Mofefe Pheto	And Night Fell
167	J. J. Rabearivelo	Translations From the Night
271	Alifa Rifaat	Distant View of a Minaret
156	Mwangi Ruheni	The Minister's daughter
47	Tayeb Salih	The Wedding of Zein
66	Tayeb Salih	Season of Migration to the North
33	Stanlake Samkange	On Trial for my Country
169	Stanlake Samkange	The Mourned One
190	Stanlake Samkange	Year of the Uprising
199	Williams Sassine	Wirriyamu
136	Kobina Sekyi	The Blinkards
163	Sahle Sellassie	Warrior King
27	Francis Selormey	The Narrow Path
71	L. S. Senghor	Nocturnes
180	L. S. Senghor	Prose and Poetry
268	Sipho Sepamla	A Ride on the Whirlwind
263	Mongane Serote	To Every Birth It's Blood
76	Wole Soyinka	The Interperters
72	Tchicaya U Tam'si	Selected Poems
104	Can Themba	The Will to Die
61	Rems Nna Umeasiegbu	The Way We Lived
202	J. L. Viera	The Real Life of Domingos Xavier
222	J. L. Viera	Luuanda
244	John Ya-Otto	Battlefront Namibia
216	Asiedu Yirenyi	Kivuli and Other Plays
128	D. M. Zwelonke	Robben Island
9	Various	Modern African Prose
14	Various	Quartet
23	Various	The Origin of Life and Death
48	Various	Not Even God is Ripe Enough
83	Various	Myths and Legends of the Congo
118	Various	Amadu's Bundle
132	Various	Two Centuries of African English
192	Various	Egyptian Short Stories
243	Various	Africa South Contemporary Writings
254	Various	Stories from Central and Southern africa
256	Various	Unwinding Threads
259	Various	The is the Time
270	Various	African Short Stories
8	Various	Book of African Verse
93	Various	A Choice of Flowers
96	Various	Poems from East Africa
106	Various	French African Verse
129	Various	Igbo Traditional verse
164	Various	Black Poets in South Africa
171	Various	Poems of Black Africa
192	Various	Anthonogy of Swahili Poetry
215	Various	Poems from Angola
230	Various	Poets to the People
257	Various	New Poetry From Africa
28	Various	Short East African Plays
34	Various	Ten One-Act Plays
78	Various	Short African Plays
127	Various	Nine African Plays for Radio
165	Various	African Plays for Playing 1
179	Various	African Plays for Playing2
224	Various	South African People's Plays
232	Various	Egyptian One-Act Plays
114	Various	Five African Plays
15	Various	Origin East Africa: a Makerere Anthology

Tillie Olsen: Yonnondio

The book itself is a fragment and named for a short poem of the same name in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge,

Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,

To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;

Yonnondio—I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine,
with plains and mountains dark,

I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,

As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the
twilight,

(Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls!

No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)

Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn'd they disappear;

To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms, factories fade;

A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the
air for a moment,

Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

But if anything, Tillie Olsen is a far more powerful writer than Whitman. her language is artful, even impressionistic at times. Apropos of recent news in the U.S.; She describes a meat processing floor on a hot summer day in the 1930s.

"The stench is vomit-making as never before. the fat and plucks, the bladders and kidneys and bungs and guts gone soft and spongy in the heat, perversely resist being trimmed, separated, deslimed; demand closer concentration than ever, extra speed. A hysterical , helpless laughter starts up. Indeed they are in hell; indeed they are the damned."

It's a similar setting described by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, or The Disinherited by Jack Conroy... but better than both. It's a shame that she has a lower profile these other working-class writers.Instead she's often cast as a Jewish writer, or a Feminist writer and of course she can be all three, but her bibliography is slim. Her first book Tell Me A Riddle published in 1961 was a collection of short stories, and Yonnondio was published in 1974 from a manuscript started in 1932. Her membership in the Communist party may have impeded her career. Her next book Silences wasn't until 1978.

Russell Working: Terrain

I don't often quote literary magazines but this was a nice chunk of word craft. In the Spring 2018 issue of Crazyhorse, a publication of the College of Charleston, is an article by Russell Working titled "Terrain." Like the best essays it's about multiple things, but Working uses his own deafness as a device to discuss a few topics: Hemingway, Insomnia, WWI injuries, Beethoven, Evelyn Waugh, and Slovenian tourism to name a few. It included a few very vivid descriptions of tinnitus. 

"It is a misconception that the deaf and hard-of-hearing dwell in Trappist silences. Day and night I hear the rumble and scram of tinnitus. The phantom sounds are caused by damaged nerves in the inner ear: a devil's philharmonic of buzzes, hums, brays, shrills, cicada chirrs, television static, leaf-blower roars, and shrieks like a factory full of motorized grindstones sharpening knives."

Mr. Working of course actually suffers from tinnitus, insomnia, Slovenian tourism and news writing. Only someone with that particular array of afflictions could possibly have written something so visceral. It makes me interested to read some of his short fiction.

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles was an American expat, writer and composer who resettled in Tangier.  He had been a member of Gertrude Stein's literary circle and later led his own circle which included Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs among others. But where Ginsberg and Burroughs returned to New York, Bowles stayed in Tangier for half a century. He outlived them all and wrote more than a dozen novels. He also translated dozens of works from Arabic and Moghrebi into English and French.

Bowles hated being grouped in with the beat writers. He had moved to Tangier in 1947, Burroughs didn't arrive until 1953. Burroughs visited socially with Bowles, but even he was 5 years younger than Bowles, and in turn 15 years younger than Ginsberg. Bowles just identified with another earlier generation of writers, like Camus and Sarte. If you have read their works you may find that his use of language spans both camps.  The Sheltering Sky was his first novel, published in 1949. The below is a poetic 4-part sentence strung together almost like a quatrain.

"The dark dream would be shattered; the light of terror would be constant; a merciless beam would be turned upon her; the pain would be unendurable and endless."

Billiards at Half Past Nine

The adjective usually assigned to Boll is "ironic."  But his novels about post-WWII Germany remain relevant today even if the irony is lost on today's readers. But the word "grim" also comes to mind, perhaps almost gothic. Of course the novels I have are English translations from the original German, it's difficult to imagine passages like this one from Billiards at Half Past Nine have changed much:

"Why didn't you kill him? With a bullet though the head. Firecrackers don't kill, my boy. You should have come to me. Death's made of metal. Copper cartridges, lead, cast iron, shrapnel—they bring death, whining and wailing, raining on the roof at night and rattling on the pergola."

Boll probably peaked in either 1967 with his Georg Buchner Prize or in 1972 with his noble prize. In the US at least, his popularity has been on the wane for decades. I actually discovered his work in a discount bin at the exterior of a books shop.

Who is Bouraba?

Bouraba was an Algerian novelist who ended up homeless in Paris. From Algiers, he wrote seven novels, all in Arabic. Today Bouraba is a common Arab surname in both Algeria and France, but is sometimes also a first name. Frankly, more is written about the tertiary character Bouraba in the Pamela Travers version Sleeping Beauty (1975). I know of two references and a third derivative of the other two.

One reference is found in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg:

"I can't fathom—anyway door knock, just turned away Arab acquaintance Bouraba, wrote 7 novels in Arabic, from Algiers, sensitive Arabic even Bill thinks is good intentioned, one maybe translated I dunno in French— wanders around Paris no place to sleep slept here last nite—I wanted to be alone with Coke Jack- said I was typing. He showed me his wet shoulders from rain and said 'mas in tout cas mieux que vous travillez sans distraction' I said 'pardon c'est vrai - a bientot'."

Another reference can be found in a quote in the Book The Beat Hotel:

"That fucking Arab woke me up at three A.M., and at eight A.M. somebody came around looking for 'friends from Oxford'. . .” The “fucking Arab was Bouraba, an Algerian who had written seven novels and who wandered around Paris, staying wherever he could, often sleeping rough. Allen had sometimes let him stay on the floor of his room if the weather was bad."

Barry Miles didn't have much to add about Bouraba that you can't glean from that single sentence in Ginsberg's letter. But the two letters are written by different people at different times. There is no doubt that Bouraba existed. But we learn nothing of his works, or of him as a person. Even not, half a century later, so little Algerian writing has been translated into French or English it may not be possible to identify him.

Gene Lees

Lees was a Canadian music critic, biographer, lyricist, and above all a journalist. His writing, even when ostensibly about music, had the gravitas of anthology. He was writing about human history, and his insight connected everything in the background to everything in the foreground up to and including a protagonist.

In the book You Can't Steal A Gift, published in 2001 he connected broadly the post WWII American rural diaspora and the effect of brutal racism on the careers of Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Jackson and Nat King Cole. Effectively it's one of the finest histories of bebop you will ever read. The book spans two decades of history but never becomes impersonal for his subjects or himself. His words have a certain economy. He dedicated the first chapter to his own roots in both music, and journalism. He visited Paris and realized the magnitude of WWII; he wrote:

"At last it became real to me that men really did from time to time dress alike , go out and, on the orders from someone unseen, obediently kill each other."

Lees died in 2010 obscure to most popular fiction readers but well-known among jazz heads.

Piece Of My Heart

The book is a fine read, even in the company of other rock n' roll history books. But the cover is strikingly gaudy. The photo is iconic but low resolution and the conflict between the low-contrast gray image and the pink and yellow spine and borders remains genuinely unpleasant. But the price was right as they say.

David Dalton was a founding editor of Rolling Stone and perhaps more in a position to rick rock history than many others. But even among Rolling Stone alumni he stands alone for his real journalistic accomplishments. He won the Columbia School of Journalism Award and the Ralph J. Gleason Best Rock Book of the Year. (Though neither was for this book) But he's written 24 books, you can't win an award every time.

But this book stands out because he write it twice and the result is more pancake than pastiche to paraphrase Adam Sternbergh. In 1972 Dalton published Janis, a mishmash of transcribed interview fragments, photographs, sheet music, lyrics, prose, and Dalton's own Rolling Stone Clippings... Piece Of My Heart takes that core and remixes it with additional content including some of his other writings on Joplin and some bits he nicked from Antonin Artaud. The resulting text is a bit bloated and even less coherent than the original. But oddly Dalton's occasional self-indulgent florid phrases function well in their context, and are not diminished the the scale and scope of the book. In particular...

"There are some for whom the night holds no terrors. Among them all these figures―criminals, insomniacs, whores, alcoholics, the inconsolable, the dreamers, and lovers―Janis was the queen."

It serves to remind us that greats like Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Nick Tosches once wrote for that once iconic and now hopelessly out of touch magazine.

The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien around 1940. It was published posthumously in 1967. Reams of criticism have been written about it's religious symbolism, its debatable status as the first "post-modern" novel. (I really don't care for that phrase. Everything currently novel is post-modern until it's passé.)  

Regardless, the circular timeline wooed critics then and it remains influential now. This status, overshadows O'Nolan's clever use of language, which is what remains more notable about his actual writing when you're done being impressed at how clever he is.

The protagonist dies early in the book. But withholding that information is key to the end of the book. In Chapter 2, to avoid being his own plot spoiler, he deftly describes death as below:

"It was some change that came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous. ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation."

Douglas Copeland

Ultimately, Douglas Copeland's seminal book Generation X lives up to it's hype. It popularized the terms "McJob" and "Generation X" among others and broke ground with it's powerful biting and ironic tone which became definitional for a generation of new writers. It's influence is blatant in works by Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk.

Whether he likes it or not, that pedigree makes Copeland godfather to the Fight Club franchise... and all the works it influenced as well. But far from a hipster himself, Copeland was a genuine craftsman of the English language.

"You see, when  you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile all sadnesses go unpitied. And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees."

A Stricken Field

Typically Martha Gellhorn gets second billing to her ex-husband Ernest Hemingway. I was pleased that this Virago Modern Classics edition didn't even mention him in her bio. Instead the focused on her record as a war reporter. In that category she was a trail-blazer. She covered five wars: Spain, Finland, China, WWII and Java. If you're not familiar with all those Google it.

"A train whistle blew and a little procession of people straggled and stumbled through the crowd, herded by soldiers. The soldiers were not shoving them—but they were keeping them moving. All the faces looked stupid with exhaustion; the eyes searching around the room, for nothing, were empty even of questions or of fear. They were like old bundles of gray cloth. They had no tickets; the soldiers herded them down a platform and they were lost in the smoke, and the crowd closed behind them."

But it's a bit vexing that her style is so similar to Hemingway. They both embraced that spare, and understated style. The passage above is one of a few where she ran long enough to use a semicolon. But while they may have influenced each other (a topic neither author's biographers want to entertain) it is just as likely they were equally influenced by their mutual experience as news-writers. regardless she remains under-appreciated.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller was science fiction writer. The genre remains the last frontier of hacks, frauds and innovators and Miller was one of the finest. Before A Canticle for Leibowitz, he had published only short stories, and it was the only novel he published in his own lifetime. So you can see that style built into the often dense language burning up all that momentum with the feeling it will be spent in 10 or 15 pages.

"They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, if was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness it could believe in perfection, and yearn for it."

He originally wrote it as three novelettes, and then seeing the theme, re-wrote and combined them into one book with three sections. The book is loaded with religious metaphors and Latinate phrases which add gravitas to certain sections, but also dignify some of the unavoidable gothic overtones that come with post-apocalyptic literature.

There are reams of analysis you can read on the text if you wish to pursue it, or just read it.  Either way I see no need to delve into that redundantly here.

Quintes

In 1962, The Selves of Quinte was dismissed as an "experimental novel", it's protagonist as a "paranoid-schizophrenic" but author Marcel Moreau went on to have a long writing career. He published his 40th book in 1998 and he's still among us. Sadly many of his works have never been translated into English.

The English edition was published by George Braziller in 1965. The text is excruciatingly dense, alternating between lengthly internal dialogue and brief external dialogues. But the setting is Brussels in the Jazz age and writers, prostitutes and poets move from club to club, from salon to bar. And when they turn on the radio that wailing "dissonant" sound emanates. I find it under-rated as a document of that beatnik era. When viewed in that light, Quintes' philosophical restlessness finds a context.

"In a hollow voice she told him fantastic stories which were never quite about love nor quite about death, an astounding mixture of confused, flashing anecdotes from which the only constant that emerged was disgust with living."

His contemporary comparisons to Kafka were misleading. His character was paranoid, but Moreau was not. Time magazine panned it as "incoherent." But in 1962 his writing was praised by Raymond Queneau, and Simone de Beauvoir. But as an  existentialist philosopher it makes sense that she'd understand. She understood enough to publish it in serial form.

War & War & Lazlo Krasznahorkai

As a writer, Lazlo Krasznahorkai gets described as postmodern and dystopian. For me that's a plus. His use of language definitely departs from tradition. He's prone to extremely long sentences, meandering sentences, sentences so long they become self-aware and break into meta-text and taunt you. That's not hyperbole. He posted the website www.warandwar.com 5 years before his book was even available in English. And it makes no sense until you've read the first 250 pages of his book. Some of his sentences are epic on their own, beyond the confines of the book.  His break from traditional form is as iconoclastic as The Sound and the Fury but he's Hungarian.. so in the U.S. he remains obscure. I only know his works through translations.

"The whole ceiling was packed with fluorescent tubes, neon to neon, at least a hundred tubes from right to left, from left to right, as densely and hauntingly packed as the graves in a military cemetery without an inch of bare space, the whole fluorescent, every tube burning and not one gone out, not one dark, so that the whole buffet glowed, as did the man standing at the bar with his back to it all, a cigarette in his hand, staring fixedly at the edge of the bar and glowing beside him, his ditch-gray eyes fixed on the man, facing him, with these broken, painfully slow words proceeding from his mouth..."

The Jungle

 Everyone literate knows something about Upton Sinclairs' The Jungle. Maybe it's the tainted meat, or the poor working conditions, immigration or maybe even the socialism.  the book was first printed as a newspaper serial in the Appeal to Reason starting in February of 1905.  The book is in the public domain. You can download a copy at Gutenberg.org here, or as scans of the original newspaper serial courtesy of the NYU library here. The book has been continually in print for more than a century. Seesharp press recently printed a complete edition of the serial version. More here. (This got a bit of mixed press.) But the editions are substantially different and if your inner Lit professor is interested, it's probably worthwhile.

But in all of this historical hullabaloo it's been forgotten that Upton Sinclair was actually quite a good writer. I was reminded of this while flipping thorough a copy of the 1986 Penguin edition with yellow cracked pages.Allow me to quote:

"His notes are never true, and his fiddle buzzes on the low ones and squeaks and scratches on the high; but these things they heed no more than they heed the dirt and noise and squalor about them— it is out of this material that they have to build their lives, with it they have to utter their souls. And this is their utterance; merry and boisterous, or mournful and wailing, or passionate and rebellious, this is music is their music, music of home. It stretches out it's arms to them, they have only to give themselves up."

Alexandra Fuller

I rarely read best-sellers. Why have the same media experience as a million other people?  I don't see the appeal. Despite that I agreed to read Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness by Alexandra "Bobo" Fuller. Overall it wasn't bad. But I'd rather have my nose in something a tad more obscure. But I did fine a single sentence I found worthy of inclusion here.

"It would at least be fair warning and an honest admission: even a good war—if there is such a thing—will kill anyone old enough to die."

 It sounds more like something Robert Stone would have written. In the context of the book it stands out as Gothic even within the a short few stark paragraphs about war. Her prose is conversational, her writing-style mostly concerned about coloring in the characters and story craft... not about language. It's that lego-brick, pointillist quality to language that I really like in good literature. I found a tiny pebble of a gem here but I'll take it.

The First Man On The Sun

Richard Henry Wilde Dillard writing as R. H. W. Dillard, is better known as a poet than a novelist and it shows in his prose. Born in 1937, Dillard is still alive, actually published What Is Owed the Dead, only in 2011. But of the dozen books he's written, only two are prose. This book, The First Man On The Sun was published in 1983.

His deep connection to verse is self-evident in his alternately clever and self-indulgent prose. Lines like "The dry hard land bursts all around into bloom; the bloom fades away."  Hemingway would have broken that into two sentences and called it good. But being that clever makes one want to be clever as well. Dense well used language is inspirational like that. But his indulgent prose has a similar appeal. If you ripped it out of the story it would double as verse:

"See and see and see. Trees blurred with a yellow green haze. Trees breaking into bud and bloom. Trees filling with wide green leaves. Trees swaying and snarling in the wind. Trees black and bleak in long steady rain. Trees ringing out with each new spring. Trees moving. Trees walking. Men and women walking, the way of man and of us all."

FOOD AND BOOKS

It's hard to say enough about a book store/restaurant. You get a free book with every entree and they give away about 100,000 books a year. You can see their sign from the side of I-91 in Connecticut. It reads simply "FOOD AND BOOKS." Two of the greatest things on earth in one place. More here, here and here.

Death of the Adversary

Hans Keilson is best known as a child psychologist. But he also wrote half a dozen books set in WWII which grippingly portray the era since he was there. His prose is usually minimalist. His books are primarily about story and not language.. but sometimes his metaphors are phenomenal.

"New antagonists will for ever arise and step into the arena, and piece after piece will crumble off our beautiful world, as though it were an ancient ruin, through whose decaying walls the wind and the rain will whistle. Every day another piece will crumble off, until nothing but a heap of stones marks the place where it once stood in better days. And we take part in the cruel game, under the illusion that we can bring it to a happy conclusion..."