The Mumpsimus

Now available for pre-order. Here's the Wesleyan University Press page for it. Here's an excerpt from the introduction, should your appetite need whetting: It may, on a quick glance, appear to be a book about a short story. On further examination, it may appear to be a book about how science fiction works, or a contribution to the literary and cultural theory of its day. It is those things, but not only those things. Like so much of Delany’s writing, its strategies and concerns nudge our view wider. Much as the best science fiction’s trivalent discourse easily lures us into considering the meaning produced by the intersections of world and text, and thus provides a powerful space for reflection on both, so Delany’s dive over and between the lines of “Angouleme” stands as a model for and instigator of various levels of thought about all the signs and languages that produce and obscure our lives. No great text ever ends if there are still readers to read it and re-read it,...

David Auerbach on Thomas M. Disch: Look at the big social novels of the 1960s. You find conspiracy theories in Pynchon and Mailer, suburban hells in Cheever and Yates and (in its apotheosis) Heller, solipsistic nihilism and self-indulgence in Barth and Wurlitzer, beatnik dropout fantasies in countless other authors. Even Gore Vidal was writing historical novels rather than anything set in the present day. Disch, though, was ahead of his time. The American heartland of his novels, contemporary or future, now seems eerily prescient. It’s not that these trends weren’t visible in the 60s and 70s, but Disch foresaw their eventual impact in the post-Cold War age that his peers mostly did not. Frequently evoking the American grotesques of Poe and Lovecraft, he brought out the ghastly ignorance that increasingly defines American political life. He exaggerates, but the uncanny familiarity of the caricature is scary. And some of what got left on the cutting room floor... I rate Disch above ...

I haven't read as much of the short fiction of Thomas M. Disch as I should. I have read a couple of his novels and a lot of his poetry, and have admired and enjoyed much of it. Yet I've only read parts of 334 , a collection of linked stories some people consider his masterpiece, and at most two or three other stories. Now that I have read "Descending" , one of his earliest published stories, I am amazed that I haven't paid more attention to Disch before. It is good, perhaps, to discover writers with large bodies of wonderful work that is unfamiliar to you, because it means there are tremendous riches to be encountered, but there is also a certain sadness, even an anger: How could I have been so stupid as not to appreciate this work until now? James Schoffstall has written perceptively about this story already, and so I don't feel compelled to revisit its themes and subject matter, because why add to what has already been done so well? What I'd like to...