I just finished tearing through The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan.
It was a few hairs under 300 pages of bloody, sexy, violent, very human, awesomeness.
This is probably the best literary horror I’ve read. It’s smart, rich with humanity—even though the humanity is mostly barely smoldering in the existentially tortured Werewolf, Jake—and very funny.
Favorite line:
Reader, I ate him.
Awesome line. Awesome book.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is - infinite.
- William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
I just went on a bit of a big book binge.
Picked up Ghost Story, the new Dresden Files novel (guilty pleasure) and The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan along with a few other more philosophical and speculative titles.
Now I just have to finish the Bolaño tome I’m traipsing through. It kind of meanders.
A site about book covers and the people who design them. How nice.
Roberto Bolaño’s highly-lauded book The Savage Detectives keeps coming up in conversation, on podcasts and among other sources I’ve been reading. So now, it jumps with a bullet to the top of my reading list. I just got the book today. Here’s the opening paragraph.
I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.
So concise, so loaded with possibility. A mysterious sounding group. No initiation, although it is perhaps the kind of group that might otherwise need an initiation so I want in.
Simple, direct sentences. And the name: the visceral realists. Wonderful.
More after reading. Unless of course the visceral realists come calling. Then, I make no promises.
In today’s Guardian Books section there is a thought-provoking piece by John Lucas on narrative, story and the obsession with plot in our book club culture. It’s a fascinating read. The essential point is that:
“Films won and books lost. That’s the story of the 20th century – the story of where the stories went,” Toby Litt observes. An emphasis on strong plot and the rejection of fiction‘s digressive powers seems to be the order of the day. We just don’t do longueurs anymore. The Richard and Judy culture of book clubs, while laudable in itself, demands strongly-plotted novels with likeable characters as fodder.
Is this really true? Is so, what does this portend for literature?
Check out this superb interview with T. Coraghessan Boyle from The Paris Review.
I love his take on creating the next Tolstoy:
Take the writers out of the classes, put them in dark cells with a plug for their monitors, a slot at the top of the door for pizza, and a slot at the bottom for waste. Every time a finished story comes back out that top slot, you write them a check for a thousand dollars. In six months, you’ll have Tolstoy.
How nice.
Watch this spare, stunning and wonderfully moving video. I adore books and was blown away by this piece.
Michael Seidenberg’s unwavering commitment to a noble and somewhat dying institution, the bookstore, is heart wrenchingly beautiful.
I hope I get to visit there one day.
(Via the Paris Review Daily)
An interview from the Atlantic with Francine Prose on reading like a writer.
