Wednesday, April 11, 2012

WHAT OUGHT TO BE ON YOUR READING DESK


A list for the Spring and Summer  2012 or really any season for that matter

--From the Library of America:   
---THE CIVIL WAR The First Year
---THE CIVIL WAR The Second Year
---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1950-1962      
---KURT VONNEGUT  Novels and Stories 1963-1973
---DAVID GOODIS  Five Noir Novels of the 1940s &50s
And then...
-- STOLEN AIR Selected poems of Osip Mandelstam  translated by Christian Wiman. (Ecco Press)
 --A TIME FOR EVERYTHING by Karl O. Knausgaard.  Archipelago
 --MY STRUGGLE by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Archipelago
 --SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai  New Directions
 --PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  Farra Straus & Giroux
 --SEX AND TERROR by Pascal Quignard.   Seagull Press
 --THE ROVING SHADOWS by Pascal Quignard.  Seagull Press
 --AS CONSCIOUSESS IS HARNESSED TO FLESH  Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980
    by Susan Sontag.  Farrar Straus & Giroux
 --THE HUNGER ARTIST by Herta Muller.  Metropolitan Books
 --TRANSPARENCY by Marek Bienzyk.  Dalkey Archive
 --ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS  by Ernst Junger.  New Directions  (out of print)
 --SONG BOOK.  The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba.  Yale University Press
 --ON THE BORDER OF SNOW AND MELT.  Selected Poems of Georgy Ivanov. Perceval Press
 --JAMES JOYCE.  A New Biography by Gordon Bowker.  Farrar Straus & Giroux

                     NOTICE
The American writers on the this list are all dead.  
Is that saying something? 
More, maybe than I would like to say, really: but does anyone look forward to any American writer’s newest book with the eager anticipation that the announcement of a new translation of a book by THOMAS BERNHARD or ROBERT PINGET or ERNST JUNGER or MICHEL LEIRIS would create?
(there is William T. Vollmann and then...)