A Book Review That is Not One: On Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts
The Argonauts made me think about the books that might be written if many scholars/writers were not bound by idiosyncratic and capricious so-called “standards” or genre conventions of scholarship and publication. I finished the last pages of the book wishing there were more books like this–which is admittedly an awkward thing to think in relation to a book that strikes one again and again as so excellently singular. Still, I found myself thinking about various writer/critic friends, thinking “so and so could write a great book like this!”–“like this” meaning the hybrid nature of autotheory that Nelson has mastered, but that we recognize in the works of Roland Barthes, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, and somewhat rare others who occupy the bizarre canon of criticism.
By Christopher Schaberg.
Top Reads of 2015: Fernando Sdrigotti
As always, I wish I could have read more in 2015. That said, it is still hard to cut down to only 10 titles. It needs to be done, though — people love lists. Here is mine, in no particular order. Michel Mourre, In Spite of Blasphemy (John Lehmann) A remainder from last year’s summer […]