October 5th, 2009 / 9:25 am
 Snippets
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StairwayToHeaven-D-4d

Inspired by 300+ comments thread on Blake Butler’s now-infamous “James Joyce Does Not Exist” post, Kyle Minor and I had a critical conversation about Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others. It’s up at the Rumpus as of this morning.

Minor: Reading A Heaven of Others, I felt […] there was that same kind of shock one gets when entering into certain works of Faulkner or Woolf or Joyce, where you simultaneously are thrilled and a little intimidated by the surface, but it doesn’t take long to just fall into it, since the text is teaching you how to read the text. It’s been so long since I’ve discovered a book like that, it feels new, but then one realizes that it’s also old-fashioned, and mourns that it’s old-fashioned.

6 Comments

  1. October 5th, 2009 / 5:25 pm Dan Wickett—

      You two knocked this one out of the park. I have this book somewhere around here and will be looking for it soon. Just read Cohen’s Two Tribal Stories which I’d picked up at AWP (Small Anchor was right behind us and I’d recognized his name from Starcherone) and was very impressed.

  2. October 5th, 2009 / 1:25 pm Dan Wickett—

      You two knocked this one out of the park. I have this book somewhere around here and will be looking for it soon. Just read Cohen’s Two Tribal Stories which I’d picked up at AWP (Small Anchor was right behind us and I’d recognized his name from Starcherone) and was very impressed.

  3. October 5th, 2009 / 3:28 pm Justin Taylor—

      thanks, Dan!

  4. October 5th, 2009 / 7:28 pm Justin Taylor—

      thanks, Dan!

  5. October 6th, 2009 / 4:10 am Ken Baumann—

      Intriguing interview. Sold.

  6. October 6th, 2009 / 12:10 am Ken Baumann—

      Intriguing interview. Sold.