The Mumpsimus

The first rejection letter I ever got was from Gardner Dozois . I was in 6th grade and had just learned about submitting stories to magazines; I had also just started reading my mother's boss's copies of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine , which Dozois had recently become editor of. I don't remember anything about the story I submitted, but I'm sure it was awful. I don't think I expected it to be accepted, because what I most remember is how excited I was to get a letter from the editor. My parents were kind and didn't tell me it was a form letter, nor that the signature was printed onto it, not written by the editor himself. I brought it to school to show my teacher. She, too, very kindly did not tell me that thousands of people likely got just this same letter. (After a few more submissions, I figured it out.) Dozois also edited what may be the single most important anthology in my life: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Third Annual Collecti...

For the Los Angeles Review of Books , I wrote about one of my favorite recent collections of short stories, Vandana Singh's Ambiguity Machines , published by the great Small Beer Press : There is a stately elegance to all the stories collected in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories , Singh’s second collection after The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories . Both books are rich with models of what science fiction can achieve as well as models of the short story as a form. Even when she is writing about far-future, faster-than-light-traveling aliens, Singh never resorts to the clichés familiar from space opera unless to undo them, never forces fast pacing with staccato sentences and short paragraphs, never plays gotcha! with the reader. Singh is a scientist — a professor of physics — and all of her stories show a scientist’s determination to develop ideas carefully and responsibly.  Yet Singh is also an artist, a writer who evokes sensual wonders in musical pr...

In writing about Brian Evenson's book about Raymond Carver, I noted that both Evenson and I first read Carver right around the time we first read Kafka and Beckett, and we did so without knowledge of the contemporary American fiction writers he's often set alongside (e.g. Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff, etc.). Later, I gained that context and, consequently, the context I'd originally brought faded, which is one reason why Brian's book so effectively brought Carver back to me — which is to say, it brought a way of reading Carver back to me. I don't mind the American writers Carver typically gets grouped with, but I'd be lying if I said their work really excites me. Kafka and Beckett, on the other hand, are among a very small group of 20th century writers whose work I am in awe of, work that I feel utterly incapable of writing about analytically, work that I can only point to and say, " That . Whatever great literature is, it must surely be that ." Now,...

At the end of my recent post about Raymond Carver *, I noted, via Brian Evenson's excellent book on Carver , the influence of James Purdy on Carver and Gordon Lish, an influence I hadn't paid attention to before. Coincidental to my rereading of Carver, I picked up a copy of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy . Over the years, I've read and enjoyed (or at least admired) a number of Purdy's novels, but only a couple of his stories. Roaming around in The Complete Short Stories , I was stunned, overwhelmed. It was a similar feeling as I had when I first picked up The Complete Stories  of Clarice Lispector — an impression of a vast, original, surprising oeuvre  revealed and tantalizing, like standing at the edge of an extraordinary landscape: knowing that what is in front of you is unlike anything you've seen before, and that more wonder lies on the other side of the horizon. There's more in Purdy's Complete Stories  than I have time or inclinati...

My academic essay "The Reader Awakes: Pedagogical Form and Utopian Impulse in The Years " has now been published in  Woolf Studies Annual  volume 24 in a special section devoted to the late Jane Marcus . Here's the abstract: This essay considers Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years as a text in which the aesthetic functions pedagogically to train the receptive reader’s imagination toward liberation from oppressive literary and social structures. This interpretation develops from implications within Jane Marcus’s reading of Woolf’s later writings and seeks an understanding of how we might continue to learn to read The Years . Marcus proposed that the form of Three Guineas , which required “much noisy page turning”, was key to the way it sought to teach readers to read and, thus, to think. This insight can be applied to The Years to develop an idea of the novel’s subversive pedagogy: the way it teaches readers to imagine new alternatives to old forms and exha...

The revelatory, and perhaps even revolutionary, power of Francis Lee's film God's Own Country  resides not in the plot, which follows a formula familiar for centuries, but in the absence of conflicts we have been trained to expect by other narratives. It is a film that has inevitably been marketed as a story of gay farmers, a kind of Brokeback Yorkshire — but the wonder is that it is not  that, not at all. Brokeback Mountain  is all about the pain of repressed love and socially unacceptable lives. In God's Own Country,  love may be repressed, but it is not because of same-sex desire, and there are elements of life that are socially sanctioned, but not because of homosexuality. When it comes to farming in northern England, there are far bigger conflicts and problems than how two guys have sex. This is not, though, one of those awful "gays are just like straights!" movie-of-the-week stories in which two people elicit all the feels by demonstrating that just b...