In this first-ever book of letters by novelist David Markson—a quintessential "writer's writer" whose work David Foster Wallace once lauded as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country"—readers will experience Markson at his wittiest and warmest. Poet Laura Sims shares her correspondence with him, which began with an impassioned fan letter in 2003 and ended with his death in 2010, finally allowing a glimpse into the personal world of this solitary man who found his life's solace in literature. The letters trace the growth of a genuine and moving friendship between two writers at very different stages; in them we see Markson grapple, humorously, with the indignities of old age and poor health, and reminisce about his early days as a key literary figure in the Greenwich Village scene of the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, he sincerely celebrates Sims's marriage and the first milestones of her career as a poet. The book is full of engaging commentary on life, love, and the writing life. Markson reveals himself to be casually erudite, caustically funny, lovably cantankerous, and always entertaining. This volume marks a significant contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Markson's indubitably important and affecting body of work and will be a delight for his longtime fans as well as those just now discovering him.
David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating" and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson's work has delighted and astonished readers for decades. Now for the first time, three of Markson's masterpieces are compiled into one page–turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers meet an author, called only "Writer," who is weary unto death of making up stories, and yet is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages and getting somewhere. Vanishing Point introduces us to "Author," who sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with note cards into a novel. In The Last Novel, we find an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") who announces that, since this will be his final effort, he possesses "carte blanche to do anything he damn well pleases." United by their focus on the trials, calamities, absurdities and even tragedies of the creative life, these novels demonstrate David Markson's extraordinary intellectual richness—leaving readers, time after time, with the most indisputably original of reading experiences.
Just when one had started mourning the demise of avant-garde and postmodern fiction . . . here comes David Markson's latest 'novel' which is anything but a novel in any conventional sense of the term. Yet it manages to keep us enthralled . . . and even moved to tears at the end. And what a thrill it is to witness the performance, a real tour de force.
Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective Harry Fannin. Together here in one volume, these works are now available to a new generation of readers. In Epitaph for a Tramp, Fannin isn't called out to investigate a murder — it happens on his doorstop. In the sweltering heat of a New York August night, he answers the buzzer at his door to find his promiscuous ex–wife dying from a knife wound. To find her killer, Fannin plies his trade with classic hard–boiled aplomb. In the second novel, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, Fannin finds himself knee–deep in murder among the beatniks and bohemians of the early 1960s, where blood seems to flow as readily as cheap Chianti. Intricately plotted and rife with wisecracks, David Markson offers suspenseful and literary crime novels.
Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state—obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness—so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. “The novel I liked best this year,” said the Washington Times upon the book’s publication; “one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein’s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination.”
Gold Diggers of 1933, a lavish and glittering showcase for Busby Berkeley's musical production talent, was designed and produced as a Depression tonic. As Berkeley said, "In an era of breadlines, Depression, and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery . . . to turn their minds away to something else. I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour. This book contains the full shooting script of Erwin Gelsey and James Seymour, based on the Avery Hopwood play of 1919, as well as the lyrics to the five songs of the film. Arthur Hove's introduction outlines the story concept from its initial Broadway form, through the 1923 silent movie, the 1929 talkie, and including several post-1933 versions. The concept of the good-hearted chorus girl with a penchant for separating wealthy men from some of their money has long been popular with both theatre and movie audiences. Hove tells much about the relationship between the story line and musical segments of the movie, about how far a writer can go before passing the baton to the director, and about how a film is actually put together. The film is remembered for Berkeley's musical and visual extravaganza. In the opening number, "We're in the Money," his sumptuous corps de ballet, numbering fifty-four, appeared in costumes made of fifty-four thousand "silver" coins. Five silver dollars, twenty-eight feet in diameter formed the background for the chorus.
An impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate about life and art—beers included. Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he’s a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art (he has five books coming out in the next year and a half). Shields and Powell spend four days together at a cabin in the Cascade Mountains, playing chess, shooting hoops, hiking to lakes and an abandoned mine; they rewatch My Dinner with André and The Trip, relax in a hot tub, and talk about everything they can think of in the name of exploring and debating their central question (life and/or art?): marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal—and, of course, writers and writing. The relationship—the balance of power—between Shields and Powell is in constant flux, as two egos try to undermine each other, two personalities overlap and collapse. This book seeks to deconstruct the Q&A format, which has roots as deep as Plato and Socrates and as wide as Laurel and Hardy, Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, and Car Talk’s Magliozzi brothers. I Think You’re Totally Wrong also seeks to confound, as much as possible, the divisions between “reality” and “fiction,” between “life” and “art.” There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters in the universe—only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish. James Franco's adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong into a film, with Shields and Powell striving mightily to play themselves and Franco in a supporting role, will be released later this year.
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