fwriction

from The Paris Review’s The Art of Publishing No. 2:

In 1951, he bought a fledgling literary publishing company, Grove Press, named after the Greenwich Village street where it began. For the next thirty-three years he ran it from various locations in the same neighborhood, developing Grove into a critical part of the downtown New York firmament and one of the most influential publishers of its day. Attracted to books that in some way—through their form or content—challenged the status quo, Rosset published writers other presses passed up because the were too far out, too experimental, or violated the prevailing mores of the day. Among them were the Beats, the postwar European avant-garde, the New American poets of the fifties and the playwrights of the Theater of the Absurd.

Always undercapitalized, Grove often paid low advances. But writers came to Grove because it championed their work in an often hostile environment. In the fifties, repressive obscenity laws made it illegal to publish D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Rosset deliberately set out to overturn these laws, publishing and defending these books, and others, in court. Over the years, Grove took on hundreds of lawsuits, in the process expanding the range of public discourse.

As the fifties turned into the sixties, and the Beat generation gave way to the counterculture, Grove became the principal home for writers who challenged the American mainstream—from both a literary and a political perspective. In addition, Grove produced a magazine, Evergreen Review, distributed art films, and by the late sixties, added a book club and two film theaters in the Village. But when the sixties ended, the press abruptly hit hard times and implemented drastic cutbacks. Rosset continued the company for another fourteen years, before selling it in 1985. He left the following year after disputes with the new management.

Following his strong personal tastes and left-wing convictions, Rosset had developed an impressive list of authors. Indeed, many Grove writers, who were considered iconoclasts in their day, are now regarded as central figures in our culture: Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Leroi Jones, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Charles Olson, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton, Hebert Selby Jr., Michael McClure, Kenzaburo Oe, D. T. Suzuki, Kathy Acker, and David Mamet. In 1988, the PEN American Center presented Rosset with its Publisher Citation for “distinctive and continuous service to international letters, to the freedom and dignity of writers, and to the free transmission of the printed word across the barriers of poverty, ignorance, censorship, and repression.”

from The Book Beast:

Dan Chaon’s intent in his chilling new short-story collection is clear. In the opening line, “Gene’s son Frankie wakes up screaming.” We learn that Gene is a UPS deliveryman trying to escape his past, and his son’s bloodcurdling screams are reminders that “something bad has been looking for him for a long time, he thinks, and now, at last, is growing near.” In these haunting tales, Chaon writes about the tragic fallout of broken families; the loss of a child, parent, or spouse often drives the narrative. In one story, a foster child moves in with a couple and sleeps in their dead son’s bed. As he grows older, his traumatic childhood catches up with him, chipping away at his grip on reality until his demons come eerily into view. Chaon excels at inciting a gripping sense of foreboding; just as the reader realizes there’s a monster in the closet, its shocking revelation only stirs the imagination further. While the notorious severed hand from his 2009 novel, Await Your Reply, is absent from this new collection, the author’s fans will delight in discovering a few stray fingers and other signature motifs.

patricksomerville:

To me, the penultimate paragraph is the most interesting part of the review, and I will end this empathy ramble there, noting that fiction writers, I think, should pitch a tent within these temporary episodes if they want to write well and continue to understand characters:

At the core of this deceptively simple book is the question of the nature of cruelty. In the last and most philosophical chapter Dr. Baron-Cohen discusses situations in which an individual who is not otherwise lacking in empathy may behave cruelly. Citing the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s term “the banality of evil,” and discussing the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo in which ordinary people exhibited cruel behavior, he acknowledges that in most of us empathy may be suspended temporarily, under certain circumstances.

dannygoodman.me:

An excerpt from my essay, “Angles of Response to Your Angles, or Brief Reflections on Tennis, Sharks, and the Loss of David Foster Wallace,” to celebrate what would have been David Foster Wallace’s fiftieth birthday.

“The goosebumps still came, despite having read that passage at least a dozen times before. Wallace had memorized the facts, the numbers; it seemed, however, even within those statistics, that Wallace had also categorized the panic, loss, horror brought on by that historic event. And, within the pages of his essay, Wallace found the words to bring to life, not only the fear, but also the interminable beauty moving, fast and determined, like a Great White shark just below the surface. He was capable, at all times, of noticing the fin breaking through the cresting waves.”