Four copies of the Incunabula edition of Little, Big by John Crowley, hand bound by an old friend for the author, artist, publisher, and one other. The special binding was commissioned to honor a pledge made long ago, and also as a gesture to mark the many hours of readerly delight that the book has given me (see here, 2001; here, 2007; an entire chapter in my Conversation, 2018; or here, 2021). John Crowley is also a friend of many years, and so it is a pleasure to know that the author’s copy — note the discreet initials at the foot of the spine — had reached him well in advance of today, this his eighty-first birthday.
Happy Birthday and all good wishes to John Crowley !
— Jonathan Lethem. Brooklyn Crime Novel. Ecco, [2023]
Brooklyn Crime Novel is a fun and tricky book. Let’s get right to the metaphor: a city street with its posse of fungible boys is the whaling ship Pequod with its disparate crew. These are two worlds that seem self-contained but are not, for each is an economic construct in the service of a global market and deeply entangled with the world outside its confines: the City is the Ocean. The cataloguer of Brooklyn childhoods is blood-brother to the sub-sub-librarian compiler of cetology. So is the Brazen-Head Wheeze. This means I got right to Melville, who (like H. P. Lovecraft) shows up at this block party.
If this were a fantasy novel, one would expect a map at the endpapers or frontispiece. Instead, one can turn to a nonfiction cognate of Brooklyn Crime Novel, “A Neighborhood, Authored”, published by Lethem in the New Yorker a couple of months before his novel appeared (28 August 2023). This is a metatextual examination of the geography and sociology of his childhood as charted in “The Making of Boerum Hill”, a New Yorker article by Jervis Anderson (14 November 1977). Very helpfully, for readers outside the Neighborhood, there is a map:
This is an agglutinative tale (124 numbered sections): a catalogue and “an infinite regress” of life on the brownstone blocks of the Brooklyn neighborhood: the brownstoners, the Screamer, Milt the Vigilante, the millionaire, and others. The boys leave the false oases of family life and the safe parts of the block every time they go out to school. They are taxed by kids from rougher streets and projects, and learn the expected behavior of an urban dance of confrontation, what is said, and the gaps and silences of what is unspoken. “The dance is a dance because no one can tell you in words. The dance is a dance because you have to learn how to do it.”
At first I had wondered about just who might be complicit in this editorial or authorial “we” that began sneaking into the text, but Lethem soon confronts this unease and incorporates it into the narrative. There is a collective voice of the neighborhood, and “we” sometimes means “Everybody”; and sometimes again, that universal consciousness seems to concentrate itself into a single person:
using in each realm his special talents to ingratiate himself to his friends’ parents, too, to get inside all their houses and say a political ma’am to somebody’s mother like he was trained to do, thus enabling him to conduct his serial investigations, C. felt he was the only person who knew everything about this place. He was stretched like a bridge across worlds.
One funny thread is the recurring notion that H.P. Lovecraft’s library has survived in a basement somewhere in Brooklyn (he did live there in a one-room apartment for a few miserable months in 1925-1926), and this gets tangled up with the chronicle of the apprentice bookseller. Some people barely survive their childhoods, and Brooklyn Crime Novel steps into that territory for a while. Cruelties are enacted unflinchingly; and the boys of the neighborhood disperse into adulthood. Sometimes their paths cross again. Lethem shows considerable courage in revisiting childhood terrain, gently mocking versions of his younger self. The narrator says, “Me? I’m just a character in this novel, the one who happens to be writing it. But someone like me surely existed.” He and the Brazen Head Wheeze are scathing about “the novelist”. “He’s the same kid, the kid we knew. He’s only a bigger kid.” When they track “the novelist” to another bar, the Brazen Head Wheeze lets him have it, “You’re our prodigal collective mouthpiece. Our bard, if I may [. . .] Let me take you to the bridge, you said, and you did. You took me to the bridge, and from that soaring span I beheld the city whole and entire.” Jonathan Lethem knows you can’t go home again but in Brooklyn Crime Novel he deftly enables the rest of us visit the neighborhood for a while.
— Howard Waldrop. H’ard Starts. The Early Waldrop. Edited by George R. R. Martin and Bradley Denton. [Subterranean Press, 2023]. Edition of 750 copies.
Collects nearly two dozen pieces described by Waldrop as “What I Wrote Before I Could Write” which is of course nonsense. “Lunchbox” was his first professional fiction sale, a Mars landing. “Onions, Charles Ives, and the Rock Novel” (an early piece written for Crawdaddy!), extrapolates from the posthumous production of Ives’ Fourth Symphony what would later become known as the “rock opera”. The four-part interview by Bradley Denton is great fun.
— — —
Max Beerbohm, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back Garden’
— Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner. Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity. New York Public Library, 2023.
This handsome little book presents the exhibition labels for the Beerbohm show drawing on the NYPL collection, Lasner’s collection at the University of Delaware, and other lenders. The book (96 pp.) is rich and instructive, the exhibition is fabulous: Max’s drawing of the Devil proposing the bargain with Enoch Soames; a superb portrait of his wife Florence Kahn in six dancing poses like a Greek frieze; Rossetti’s courtship of Elizabeth Siddal; caricatures of Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and the red-headed Aubrey Beardsley; and “Mr. Beerbohm reading Mrs. Woolf”, a little sketch of himself falling asleep, in perfect imitation of the Vanessa Bell cover for her sister’s book; and more. The effect is a dense studio style hanging of drawings in a tiny room, and it works.
— Kenneth W. Rendell. Safeguarding History. Trailblazing Adventures inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History. Foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Whitman Publishing, [2023].
Memoir by the eminent autograph expert and bookman, from humble origins to international success. The accounts of uncovering forgeries are case studies of self-delusion by those who wanted to believe, and of Rendell’s clear thinking and basic skepticism. To read the book is to hear the author’s cadences and manner of speaking, very nicely done. The chapter on forming the library of Bill and Melinda Gates (and the logistics of its installation) is really something.
— John Howard and Mark Valentine. Possessions and Pursuits. Sarob Press, 2023.
Short novel by Howard, Fallen Sun, and two short stories by Mark Valentine, “Masque and Anti Masque” and “The Prospero Machine”. Third volume of tributes to the metaphysical novels of “Inkling” Charles Williams.
— — —
— Maureen Kincaid Spiller. A Traveller in Time. The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Spiller. Edited and with an introduction by Nina Allan. [Foreword by Paul Kincaid]. Academia Lunare | Luna Press Publishing [i.e., POD printed in U.S.A., 8 September 2023].
An excellent memorial volume assembling essays and reviews from her website Paper Knife and from Strange Horizons (chiefly 2010-2022, with a handful of earlier pieces), arranged thematically. The section on British author Alan Garner is fascinating as it shows her thinking about his work over decades (the earliest is from 1987; and the most recent is the last piece she published, in 2022). From the preface: “It was this notion, I think, this sense that everything we read is part of an ongoing and unending exploration, that convinced her to start reviewing. It was certainly the guiding principle behind the criticism she did write.”
— Jean-Claude Izzo. Chourmo. Une enquête de Fabio Montale [1996]. Gallimard [Folio policier, 2022].
Marseille crime novel.
— Sarban. The Doll Maker and other tales of the uncanny. Peter Davies, [1953].
— Cyril Connolly. The Modern Movement. One Hundred Key Books from England, France and America 1880-1950. André Deutsch / Hamish Hamilton, [1965].
— Charles Renouvier. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, qu’il aurait pu être. Bureau de Critique Philosophique, 1876.
— Alexander Ames and Mark Samuels Lasner. Grolier Club Bookplates Past & Present. With contributions by William E. Butler and Molly Dotson. Illustrated. The Grolier Club, 2023.
— Jonathan Lethem. Brooklyn Crime Novel. Ecco, [2023].
/ tricky and fun ! even as a reader might wonder about just who is this editorial or authorial ‘we’ sneaking in as parenthetical notes. A posse of all the Jonathan Lethems of the past ?
/ file under : the courage to revisit childhood
— Sarban. The Doll Maker and other tales of the uncanny. Peter Davies, [1953].
— Charles Renouvier. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, qu’il aurait pu être. Bureau de Critique Philosophique, 1876.
— [Charles Renouvier]. Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’Histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être. Paris : Bureau de la Critique philosophique, 1876.
A recent glimpse of a copy of Uchronie prompted me to start reading this landmark of speculative history. It’s a tricky book, a work of ideas that employs several layers of apparent estrangement devices (somewhat like the original Castle Rackrent). I will report further.
I saw Uchronie in a display case not far from a nice copy of Utopia (Louvain, 1516) in La science-fiction à la Sorbonne, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne. Truth be told, the BIS copy of Uchronie is a little nicer than the one I’m reading :
The exhibition, which had just opened, is part of an ongoing Année de la science-fiction and is on view in the salle Jacqueline-de-Romilly (BIS, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris) through 20 December. Non-university folks must register to visit, details here : http://www.bis-sorbonne.fr/biu/spip.php?rubrique537 . There are author events announced through March 2024 and joint initiatives with the scholarly journal ReS Futurae.
The exhibition, which includes books from More’s Utopia through contemporary paperbacks of French science fiction and works in translation, with an interesting visual component. The case of early works contains these:
Also of note was a bibliographical item : Régis Messac. Esquisse d’une chrono-bibliographie des utopies. Lausanne : Club Futopia, 2962 (sic). The title page carries an epigraph from Leconte de Lisle : “Ton coeur est dévoré d’un songe indestructible”.
P.S. Glare from the overhead lights meant I couldn’t take a picture of the BIS Utopia, but here is a snapshot of the copy at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal :
The Endless Bookshelf will be filing occasional despatches from Paris during annual congrès of the Association internationale de bibliophilie (AIB), and may lapse into French on occasion
[from an earlier visit, the mural of the reader, by Ferdinand Humbert, in the Petit Palais]
— Charles Dantzig. Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien. Grasset, [2009].
And, soon after arriving in a rooftop apartment in the 4e, well, yes, of course I opened this book, to this page (252), in the Listes des personnes [list of persons]
The Darkening Garden.A Short Lexicon of Horror by John Clute.
Cauheegan; Seattle: Payseur & Schmidt, [2006].
Illustrated. [xii], 162, [4] pp. $45.00
reviewed by Henry Wessells
[First published in The New York Review of Science Fiction 19:7, no. 223 (March 2007). All rights reserved.]
The Knowledge at the Heart of the Labyrinth
The Darkening Garden is a brilliant, irritating book, a dark little jewel of a grenade tossed into the cocktail party of genre criticism.Its subtitle, A Short Lexicon of Horror, is Clutean misdirection deftly understated. What we have here is a philosophical engine, an encyclopedia in miniature (assuming a certain degree of knowledge on the reader, author entries can be found elsewhere or simply imagined) and, most importantly, a record of how John Clute thinks. This last is no small matter.
FUSTIAN by Jason van Hollander
The Darkening Garden is a collection of thirty short essays on topics relevant to the horror sort of fantastic literature. No particular affinity for horror literature is required. The terms that Clute defines will be of interest to all readers, just as the critical approach these terms articulate bears upon all sorts of fantastic literature. (I use the neutral term sort— less charged than flavor or variety — here, precisely, in place of genre or mode because definition of genre is one of the concerns of the book at hand.)
The illustration at top is Jason van Hollander’s FUSTIAN portrait of John Clute. The complete text of The Darkening Garden is available in Clute’s Stay (Beccon, 2014).
— Michael Swanwick. Red Fox, Blue Moon. [16] pp. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 69 copies. Stitched in blue wrappers with a photo on front wrapper.
Another world in miniature from the deft and prolific Mr. Swanwick, a history of the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia, replete with fox lore and subversive whimsy from what archy would call the “under side”.
[Swanwick is a master of the short short story and more than fifty of these have appeared in the ephemeral Dragonstairs books (the tally of fiction is more than 30 titles to date).]
— Michael Swanwick. The Best of Michael Swanwick. Volume Two. 530 pp. Subterranean Press, 2023. Edition of 1,000 copies, signed by the author. Evergreen cloth and pictorial dust jacket by Lee Moyer.
Includes the beautiful and devastating “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again”, the oh-so-tricky homage of “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin”, “The Beast of Tara” (“a story idea I came up with in the mid-seventies and finally wrote last year. So if you’re wondering how long it takes to write one of these things and many other fine tales”), and many more. “Libertarian Russia” is filled with a sense of wonder and loss and deep nostalgia and reads like a despatch from another lifetime though it dates from 2010.
[The Best of Michael Swanwick, “predecessor to the current volume” (as the jacket panel notes), was published by Subterranean in 2008 in an edition of 150 signed copies.]
— Kit Reed. Deaths of the Poets. Designed and illustrated by Joseph Reed. Text within illustrated borders. [34], [2, blank] pp. [Middletown]: At the Sign of the Piratical Primrose, 1991. Second, revised edition (150 copies, initialled by the author and artist). Gilt leather-grained card wrappers with printed label. This copy was inscribed to Brian and Margaret Aldiss.
A poet’s life is like a breath
After which — you guessed it — Death
[. . .]
Now echoing down hills & valley
Comes our last word, it’s Hey, Finale!
Though taken out by fate’s sharp knife
We leave the verse, to signal: Life!
An abecedarium of dead poets : Aeschylus, Byron, Crane, Donne, Euripides, Fuller, Goethe, Homer, Akhenaton, Johnson, Keats, Lovelace, Molière, Nerval, Ovid, Pope, Quasimodo, Rilke, Sand, Tennyson, Urban, Villon, Wilde, Xenophon, Yeats, and Zoroaster.
Kit Reed was a really nice warm person, and a sharp and funny writer. We read together at the KGB science fiction reading series in 2004, when Another green world had just appeared, and she was skewering many American obsessions with her Thinner than Thou (what could possibly go wrong if . . . ?!?). It was the hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday, 16 June 2004, and to mark the occasion I read “A prayer for James Joyce” by James Blish. A lot of blank looks in the audience, but Kit and a few others knew what it was about. I used see her and Joe at Readercon (she was guest of honor in 2014). As always, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has some useful things to offer about her stealthy, explosive prose : https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/reed_kit.
Deaths of the Poets was first published in 1978 as a book of etchings in an edition of ten copies (only Yale and the Boston Athenaeum report copies).
— Rosalie Parker. Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories. [vi], 239 pp. Tartarus Press, [2023]. Pictorial boards, dust jacket.
A new collection of 18 stories from this talented author, presenting a variety of modes and settings, plus a fabulous book-within-a-book, “Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences”. The stories also display a remarkable range of voices and a change of register from one story to the next, the oppressive tone of “Home Comforts”is followed by the quiet austerity and sense of the inescapable at the heart of “The Decision”. “Pebble” is a dark fable of modern slavery; it takes a sudden, darker turn that speaks of liberation.
The first story, “Beguiled”, starts as a glimpse of an aristocratic young lady’s privilege and confinement in Imperial Russia, with a flavor of some of the tales of Saki. The narrative moves with concision and perfect pitch to an icy conclusion and a devastating last line. The effect is breathtaking ! and all in eight pages of the most lucid prose.
The title story, “Dream Fox”, a variation on the Reynard tales, is deeply subversive of the patriarchy and the county landholding class. It is the rebellious imagination of the adolescent girl that powers the transformation. The outcome is utterly that of “Kitty” by Paul Bowles.
“Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences” is a collection of nine stories of ghosts and uncanny experiences in contemporary Britain, a book “chanced upon in a remainder outlet or a charity shop, rather than a bona fide bookstore”, published by a vanity press for “the crazy old woman who own all those millions in the National Lottery” and who wants to share her belief in the paranormal. The frame story is told in an introduction and the headnotes to each account. It is hilarious (is it a cameo self-portrait of the author?): in “The Dating Game”, Mary Belgrove tells Scott, “Perhaps we need to recognise that in this case ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead’ may be relative terms.” The experiences (each narrated in a distinct voice) are dislocating and defy reductive explanation.
