In his New York Times review of Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, Todd Pruzan explains how Raymond Carver “advanced a literary genre with ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.’ The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but ‘vaguely titled fiction’: stories concealing their intensity and…
Entries from March 2010
Having It Both Ways
Maile Meloy looks to Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx and Joyce Carol Oates in her second collection of short stories.
March 28th, 2010 · No Comments
Tags: Book Reviews · The Rabbit Rants · Uncategorized
Looking Back With Philip Levine
Memory serves the voice of the voiceless.
March 19th, 2010 · No Comments
Old men deserve memory. Philip Levine has a good one and he knows how to put it to use. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, at 83, still finds his past to be fertile, as he has for some 50 years. But there’s something new in News of…
Tags: Book Reviews
Threadgill Marches On
The wiggling spermatozoa of Zooid.
March 18th, 2010 · No Comments
Eight years past Up Past Two Lips, composer-saxophonist Henry Threadgill continues to pare down his carnival of sound into something that’s more than a sideshow but less the three-rings his Very Very Circus bands once performed. Composition, as always in Threadgill’s music, is important and one can’t help but think…
Tags: Music Reviews
Head Trip
Daniel Johnston's comic art gets inside his--and your--skull.
March 17th, 2010 · No Comments
In Daniel Johnston’s art, it’s all about the head. Big heads, hollowed-out heads, tiny heads, duck and cat and mouse heads, severed heads, devil heads, heads with one eye and heads with many eyes waving on tentacles. No matter how many characters and twisted setting pieces fill one of his…
Tags: Comics
Song of Myself
Raymond Carver's poetry sheds light on his self-absorption
March 16th, 2010 · No Comments
Not to be forgotten in any consideration of Raymond Carver is his poetry. Mostly written in the last ten sober years of his life, the poems support the notion of the self-absorbed Carver that Carol Sklenicka’s recent biography suggests. Never one to admire poets dependent on “I” as subject for each…
Tags: Book Reviews · The Rabbit Rants
Evil Genius
Raymond Carver as victim and victimizer.
March 15th, 2010 · No Comments
Which is better? Minimalist and working-class author Raymond Carver’s original manuscripts? Or the stories published after Gordon Lish’s edits? Some 20 years after Carver’s death, the answer has supporters on both sides. It’s the question on which Carol Sklenicka’s big and sometimes frustrating biography of the famous minimalist, working-class writer…
Tags: Book Reviews · Top Story
