Saturday, September 2, 2017

Elizabeth Hardwick, _Sleepless Nights_

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THIS IS TURNING into the Summer of Lowell for me. I read this--not exactly a memoir and not exactly a novel, musical rather than chronologic...
Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Robert Lowell, _Notebook 1967-1968_; Laynie Browne, _Daily Sonnets_

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READING JAMISON'S BOOK made me want to re-read some Lowell, and I went with this, the original publication of the sonnets later refashio...
Saturday, August 19, 2017

Álvaro Enrigue, _Sudden Death_, trans. Natasha Wimmer

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WOW. THIS IS good. Are there more translations in the pipeline? This is only his second book in English, so far as I can tell from Amazon, b...
Friday, August 18, 2017

Emma Donoghue, _The Wonder_

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I DID NOT read Room , but I read a chapter from this in Granta and thought, well, worth a spin. It's a historical novel, set in post-...
Thursday, August 17, 2017

Nathan Hill, _The Nix_

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I WAS SLOW to pick this one up, because novels that get the kind of build-up this one did last year are often disappointing, but I took a ch...
Monday, August 14, 2017

Postscript on Jamison, _Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire_

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JAMISON QUOTES FROM several of Lowell's 1977 obituaries: "fairly generally considered the most distinguished American poet, and ind...
Saturday, August 12, 2017

Kay Redfield Jamison, _Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study in Genius, Mania, and Character_

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NOT A BIOGRAPHY, Jamison specifies, but a study of how Lowell's manic-depressive illness (Jamison seems to prefer this term to "bi-...