And thus a weekend is wasted.Īnd a few conversations with Catheryn Kilgarriff later, Dalkey had put together a four-book project to reissue this unique author who, despite all her advances in the realm of what literature can do, she-much like her compatriot B.S. ]įast-forward a few years, and I was starting out at Dalkey, recommending authors to reissue I had heard of, like, IDK, Ann Quin, and, lo and behold, John O’Brien pulls from his shelves all four of her novels. Worth noting though that I did discover Raymond Queneau in this “Q”-related search. (And the rest of you make money with your actual hands and bodies like smart folk.) Every new or used bookstore I entered I would pass by “P” for “Pynchon” and end up at “Q” for “Quindlen.” (I think Quindlen has lead a very successful life as a writer, but to me, she’ll forever be “the Q-named author who isn’t Ann Quin.”) This is a specific flavor of Nerd Disappointment some of you relate to. (All the illustrations in Tripticks are by Quin’s lover, Carol Annand.)įor whatever reason-that her books were really only issued in the UK by Marion Boyars Publishers, that online interlibrary loan requests were a few years in the future, that didn’t yet exist-I couldn’t get ahold of these books to save my life. And that her “wildest” book was Tripticks, which included Goo-era Sonic Youth illustrations: Not a one-to-one comparison, but a fellow traveler on the experimental, NON-MALE, mode of storytelling. This took place in the way back, pre-Wikipedia, squarely in the dial-up era of the “information superhighway,” but I remember reading something about how Ann Quin could be considered a Kathy Acker precursor. As vague as the reference was-in Strehle’s book, or whatever actual book I’ve replaced with hers in my memory-I was INSTANTLY INTRIGUED. In a book about Pynchon, Barthelme, Atwood, and the like, a reference to Quin feels likely, although I think she was mentioned in a toss-away comment, one of those classic, “another author who mines this vein of theoretical underpinnings is Ann Quin, an experimental British novelist from the 1960s, who isn’t well-known these days” sort of bits. (Two great obsessions-fiction and “quantum”-that taste great together?) There’s a chance I’m misremembering this (or applying quantum ideas, there’s a chance that I’m both right and wrong and no one will know the outcome until they observe Strehle “Schröedinger’s” Index), but it was there and then that I first came across the name “Ann Quin.” One of the academic books I really liked at the time was Fiction in the Quantum Universeby Susan Strehle. (Foolish Young Chad! Bad at love, bad at career choices!) I devoured every Pynchon book, Coover ( The Public Burning in particular), William Gaddis, Wittgenstein, every Kathy Acker book, any and all pop-sci books about quantum mechanics and string theory, and some random academic books since, at the time, I had aspirations of going on to get a PhD. 1 X-wife?) to complete her degree-I did nothing but read for the English GRE and explore all the books that I had been dying to get to, but never had time for when I was in school. Kudos to all! And now on to this unrelated post.įor a year after graduation from Michigan State-while I was waiting for my then future wife (aka, No. (And the first of hers I read.) And also want to send a shout out to Fitzcarraldo/Jacques Testard, whose authors seem to win the Nobel almost every year. She’s a legend, and I have a special place in my heart for Cleaned Out, since that was a Dalkey book. Before we get into this post, I just wanted to congratulate Annie Ernaux and all of her publishers and translators on winning the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |