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Announcing the Book Club Schedule!
The votes are in, and the winner of the poll for the first book to be discussed in the Big Other Book Club is Tom McCarthy’s C. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, hailed by many and knocked by maybe...
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A Good Man Gives Me A Bad Man
Tonight, I went with Greg Gerke to an event honoring the ever-inimitable Stanley Elkin. After a short documentary of Elkin’s life (featuring soundbites from his wife, daughter, William Gass, and...
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Reading Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures: On “The Bailbondsman”
If you’ve been following along with us here at Big Other, you know that in January we read and discussed Tom McCarthy’s C (more here and here), followed that up with Mary Caponegro’s The Complexities...
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Reading Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures: “The Making of Ashenden”
Ken Emerson, in his rather fine article “The Indecorous, Rabelaisian, Convoluted Righteousness of Stanley Elkin” (March 3, 1991) writes: Elkin, no lover of those writers he has called “the...
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Reading Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures: “The Condominium”
“The Condominium,” the third and final novella in Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures, features another rather garrulous “hero,” this time Marshall Preminger, a thirty-seven-year-old virgin, who...
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Guest Post: Hilma Wolitzer on Stanley Elkin
It was such glorious fun to be Stanley Elkin’s friend as well as his reader. He was always wonderfully irreverent and free of sentimentality. Hence the questionably qualified rabbi (in The Rabbi of...
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Stanley Elkin, ghosting through Boston, beautifully.
Stanley Elkin proved remarkably supportive and generous with me, c. 1977 in Boston. He’d come to town as a visiting writer at Boston U., just another of the amazing lineup (Barth, Barthelme [Donald],...
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Guest Post: W.F. Lantry Remembering Stanley Elkin
Stanley Elkin: Fiction as a Form of Mathematics By W.F. Lantry So there I was, just inside the Beltway, watching some popular movie the other day. When you’re writing a novel, there’s a lot to be said...
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A Medley of Gass Interviews and His Influence
Over at the Reading William Gass website, curated by Stephen Schenkenberg, a video has been unearthed of Gass talking in Paris about five years ago. He reads from The Tunnel for a short time–then...
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A Year of Reading
I read 203 books in 2011, or, on average, a little more than one book every two days. You would think I would be burnt out, and I am a little, but, as trials go, it was strictly Judge Wapner...
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