“Are you experiencing any of the following: (1) A thirst for palinka? (2) A yearning for Budapest, though the closest you’ve ever come is the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan? (3) An urge to deploy diacritical marks over every other vowel? If so, you may be suffering from Hungarophilia.”
Ghosts of Budapest by Garth Risk Hallberg
“I did something crazy this year. I blew half of a freelancing check on the complete, seven-volume edition of William T. Vollmann’s 3,000 page essay on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. (What can I say? It was either that or diapers for my children.)”
I can no longer remember the precise distinction between the uncertainty principle and the observer principle, but one way or another, I’ve started to detect a feedback loop involving the Year in Reading series and the reading life it purports to document. When I dashed off my first entry, in 2005 (can that be right?), it was purely in the spirit of a report. But by 2012, even in January, February, and March, I found myself picking up a given book and asking: Is this a contender for the series? Is there any chance this is going to be the best thing I read this year? And if not, back onto the shelves it went.
Our own Garth Risk Hallberg has a story in Prairie Schooner’s Summer Issue, and they interviewed him about the way he writes.
“De La Pava’s indifference to the prevailing trends of the marketplace helps to account for the number of rejections he would receive from literary agents (88, according to The Chicago Tribune.) But it’s also what’s so alarming about his novel’s close brush with obscurity. It suggests that traditional publishing has become woefully backward-looking, trying to shape the novel of tomorrow based on what happened yesterday. Could A Naked Singularity have benefited from a good editor? Of course, but books like this — singular, urgent, commanding — are supposed to be what good editors live for.”
- Outside the Ring: A Profile of Sergio De La Pava by Garth Risk Hallberg
A self-published magnum opus was, to say the least, an unusual project for a prestigious university press. It had to pass muster with the board of faculty members and administrators that signs off on each book published. But, thanks in large measure to statements of support from the novelist Brian Evenson and critics including Steven Moore, the press decided to acquire the rights to the book. From there, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the window of my local Barnes & Noble, where I passed it just this week.
It turns out that my sense of the “classiness” of the English novel is like my sense of the monolithic “classiness” of English elocution — that I suffer from a kind of cognitive foreshortening, wherein important distinctions disappear. In fact, what the English novel is overwhelmingly about, in class terms, is not the hereditary nobility but the middle classes: the downwardly mobile landowners, the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.
Source: themillions.com
In the house where I grew up, the child of English teachers, PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre connoted “classiness” in at least two senses. On one hand, its filmed adaptations of classic novels added a touch of literary refinement (and sometimes even of eat-your-vegetables self-improvement) to a television schedule larded with junk food. On the other, it offered a place for us churchmice to indulge our fascination with “class” in the baser sense: idle wealth and posh intrigues and butlers who ring for tea at three.
Garth Risk Hallberg on the literary pedigree of Downton Abbey.
Source: themillions.com
I picked up Eugenides’s new novel, “The Marriage Plot,” an exuberantly bookish book that offers the clearest account to date of his cohort’s collective aspirations and anxieties. There is, it turns out, a unifying thread; it’s just not a matter of form. The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer “How should novels be?” but “Why write novels at all?”
Millions staff writer Garth Risk Hallberg has an essay in the New York Times Magazine today about this chain of YouTube videos.
Source: The New York Times
Smith’s avant-garde is a gradual convergence on what she insists doesn’t exist: the one true and transcendent Real. But look at the “disturb and disrupt” mandate I sketched above—hell, look at Smith’s essay—and you’ll instantly see that avant-gardism, like its dark twin kitsch, is always situational. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, Wagner’s innovations are disruptive; by the mid-Twentieth, they’re the soundtrack for Triumph of the Will.
—Garth Risk Halberg, “How Avant Is It? Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, and the Novel’s Way Forward”
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
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Source: themillions.com
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![Smith’s avant-garde is a gradual convergence on what she insists doesn’t exist: the one true and transcendent Real. But look at the “disturb and disrupt” mandate I sketched above—hell, look at Smith’s essay—and you’ll instantly see that avant-gardism, like its dark twin kitsch, is always situational. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, Wagner’s innovations are disruptive; by the mid-Twentieth, they’re the soundtrack for Triumph of the Will.
—Garth Risk Halberg, “How Avant Is It? Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, and the Novel’s Way Forward”
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
[Image]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx18auOyGp1r6xvfko1_1280.jpg)