by Georges Perec
The title, with its insipid New Age flavor, is the worst thing about
this bold work of experimental fiction. During the same decade
Georges Perec’s novel most famous book was released, the
bestseller charts were filled with …
Essay by Ted Gioia
What do we do about Knut Hamsun? Should we honor him as a Nobel Prize winner in
literature? Was he, as some claim, the first great modernist in fiction? Or was he just recycling
Dostoevsky for …
Essay by Ted Gioia
At first glance, William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central demands respect
as a serious and sober historical novel. The book is massive; the cover
foreboding. The characters are dark and gloomy, and the incidents related
are even …
Joyce spent a decade trying to find a
publisher for the most famous book of
short stories from the modern era
by Ted Gioia
Poet George Russell clearly had some trepidation when he
asked his friend and fellow writer James …
Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars
By Ted Gioia
At times, the progressive spirits of 20th century fiction seemed
determined to turn the novel into something other than fiction. In
their opinion, the novel might resemble an annotated poem, a …
by Ted Gioia
John Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer is perhaps best
remembered nowadays as a trial run for this same author’s U.S.A. Trilogy,
a massive 1,200-page work that would take up most of Dos Passos’s
attention over …
by Ted Gioia
Twenty years elapsed between William Gaddis’s debut
novel The Recognitions (1955) and his follow-up book
JR (1975). Don’t blame Gaddis for laziness. During
that period, he needed to work a series of demanding
day gigs to pay …
I hate to say it, but I’ve gotten Leo Tolstoy wrong for most of my adult life. I have legitimate
excuses, of course—I was simply adhering to the consensus view. I accepted the
conventional wisdom. I …
by Ted Gioia
William Gaddis’s The Recognitions consists of 956 pages
of very small print—some half million words in total. But the
author summed it up in a single word. “The book is a novel
about forgery,” Gaddis wrote to …
(An Essay in 26 Fragments)
by Ted Gioia
1
Mainstream literary fiction is falling to pieces.
2
This may not be a bad thing.
3
The fragmented novel has been a mainstay of the literary
world for the last …
