Friday, June 8, 2007

Here & Elsewhere (A love letter to The Believer)

Apparently (to my pleasant surprise) The Believer's Dan Johnson wrote a review of Black Sparrow's Here & Elsewhere: the Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke that was subtitled Is it still postmodern if it came out in 1924? (ha!) and slipped right under our radar! The best part: they loved it. Which gives me hope for the future. Here is a short excerpt:

His mastery of the English language allows him to compose pieces that succeed as philosophy, domestic drama, myth, hallucination, or pure music—usually succeeding at several at once, sometimes becoming just one or two, and sometimes, thrillingly, swerving between all of them in baffling succession. “Let us build a great hippopotamus,” begins the coda to one otherwise realistic story—apropos nothing whatsoever—“to the glorification of our century.”

To read the rest of the review, check it out at The Believer. As an unrelated plug, the folks at this great and still-young magazine have begun publishing one poem per issue as well, and THAT makes us poor poetry people here at Godine and Black Sparrow mighty happy.

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