David Winters, 3:AM‘s co-editor in chief (twitter: @davidcwinters):
My summer reading got off to a good start, with Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity (yes, I know; I came late to this one) followed by Rachel Kushner’s rousing The Flamethrowers (I have a short review of this coming soon). Like Greg, I’ve also been revisiting Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner—especially A Homemade World, which has helped consolidate my plans for a long-term writing project on innovative American fiction.
Speaking of which, the appearance (or more aptly, the apparition) of Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous marks, for me, the publishing event of the summer. Schwartz is without doubt the most challenging author I’ve ever tried to review; truly, a prose stylist without example. Two recent reprints also warrant attention: Dawn Raffel’s landmark short story collection In the Year of Long Division, now available from Dzanc (review forthcoming) and Scott Bradfield’s The History of Luminous Motion, from Calamari.
As for philosophy and theory, I’ve enjoyed Tom Eyers’ rigorous reconstruction of the neglected connections between French structuralism and earlier modes of rationalist epistemology. A review of his book, Post-Rationalism, will appear at some point. So, too, will a double review of Franco Moretti’s new books, The Bourgeois and Distant Reading (of these, I greatly admired the former, and disagreed with aspects of the latter). Spurred on by Joseph Tanke’s review in the LA Review of Books, I’m about to start Jacques Rancière’s magnum opus, Aisthesis. And digging deeper into the TBR pile, I look forward to finally reading György Lukács’ Soul and Form.
Apart from that, it looks like I’ll spend much of the next month or two getting to grips with Niklas Luhmann’s daunting Art as a Social System. Meanwhile, my shamefully half-read copy of Gass’s The Tunnel mocks me from my windowsill.