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The Rumpus on Shane Jones and Stanley Crawford
Justin Dobbs tipped us off that The Rumpus had published last week a nice review of Shane Jones’ Light Boxes. Jovanovic writes:
Jones makes use of ambiguity and possibility in the fabulist tradition of Gabriel García Márquez, but Light Boxes should not be considered a magic-realist novel. The sidereal reality of Thaddeus and The Solution is not simply one where magical elements are introduced into ordinary settings, like the man vomiting rabbits into flowerpots in Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” (though Thaddeus does vomit ice cubes)—in Jones’s novel there are few touchstones to the world as we know it. Light Boxes partakes in the traditions of folklore, archetypal myth, and oral history, a pedigree reflected in its images and descriptions. Clouds have legs and shoulders. They are shaped like a hand and can fall apart like wet paper.
Dobbs’ email reminds me that I need to read The Rumpus more, because likely I’ll find good stuff over there, such as this blog post by Deb Olin Unferth on Stanley Crawford’s The Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine.
If I had to make a small, partial statement here about book reviewing, I’d say this: I find that the most effective reviews (those that affect me most, I mean) tend to be the reviews that make me remember how much I enjoyed reading a certain book (for some reason, I rarely read reviews of books I haven’t yet read?). And I’m using ‘reviews’ here in the loosest sense. Jovanovic’s review and Unferth’s blog post both do this. I enjoy reading another’s telling of his or her experience of a book and I enjoy the connections that telling ignites in my head.
Is this a stupidly simple appreciation of book reviews? Probably.
Tags: Deb Olin Unferth, justin dobbs, shane jones, stanley crawford, The Rumpus
Great reviews both. Jovanovic has been reviewing a ton of stuff for the rumpus lately. http://therumpus.net/topics/rozalia-jovanovic/
Great reviews both. Jovanovic has been reviewing a ton of stuff for the rumpus lately. http://therumpus.net/topics/rozalia-jovanovic/
i think it’s interesting to imagine the difference between effective and affective reviews, i.e. the difference between reviews that produce the most effects in the world and reviews that affect people strongly, i don’t know if there is a real difference there, funny to imagine tho
i think it’s interesting to imagine the difference between effective and affective reviews, i.e. the difference between reviews that produce the most effects in the world and reviews that affect people strongly, i don’t know if there is a real difference there, funny to imagine tho
I like that you rarely read reviews of books you haven’t read- I do the same, because carrying around the ideas of someone else as you enter a book ruins it for me.
oh man.
effective in that it causes the effect of my being affected emotionally.
oh man.
effective in that it causes the effect of my being affected emotionally.
over at the rumpus, Peter Orner’s weekly(?) column on the short story, THE LONELY VOICE, is the bee’s tits.
over at the rumpus, Peter Orner’s weekly(?) column on the short story, THE LONELY VOICE, is the bee’s tits.
yeah, i really liked his thing about peter taylor
yeah, i really liked his thing about peter taylor
I like that Deb Olin Unferth likes language patterns.
I like that Deb Olin Unferth likes language patterns.
whoa! woah? whoooaa this weird! i just now opened an email from amazon, one of those annoying amazon recommends, but this time in the subject line it recommended ‘log of the s s’ and when i opened the email the third book from ‘log’ was unferth’s vacation. so whoa! i wonder if that’s just a cosmic coincedence. but maybe my exposure to the recent exposure on htmlg was registered in the morphogenic field at the quantum level because they also recommened feynman’s ‘elementary particles and the laws of physics’ and as such the wave patterns could have collapsed from a potential field into a pixel pattern resembling a virtual amazon email. what a saturday morning. pudding pops! that’s what the fuck i’m saying! pudding pops!
whoa! woah? whoooaa this weird! i just now opened an email from amazon, one of those annoying amazon recommends, but this time in the subject line it recommended ‘log of the s s’ and when i opened the email the third book from ‘log’ was unferth’s vacation. so whoa! i wonder if that’s just a cosmic coincedence. but maybe my exposure to the recent exposure on htmlg was registered in the morphogenic field at the quantum level because they also recommened feynman’s ‘elementary particles and the laws of physics’ and as such the wave patterns could have collapsed from a potential field into a pixel pattern resembling a virtual amazon email. what a saturday morning. pudding pops! that’s what the fuck i’m saying! pudding pops!