Posts From Author: kevin birmingham

Reading 2014

Being a collection of disordered thoughts on new writing from the last year or so. There were lots of books about books. I enjoyed Rebecca Mead‘s My Life in Middlemarch (Crown Publishing, 2014) and Joanna Rakoff‘s My Salinger Year (Knopf, 2014), which both fused literary criticism and autobiography into what Joyce Carol Oates called, reviewing Mead, “bibliomemoirs.” “The book was reading me, as I was reading it,” wrote Mead of Middlemarch, locating George Eliot’s greatness in her broad imaginative sympathies. Mead’s is a lovely book, mixing biographical detail about Eliot with an introspective analysis of how her work might be read and re-read on the journey through life (review here). Rakoff’s book, meanwhile, is more straightforwardly autobiographical, recounting the author’s first job in publishing, in which she became a sort of gatekeeper for J.D. Salinger. Until then, she’d not read him (“I was not interested in hyper-articulate seven-year-olds who quoted from the Bhagavad Gita”); but before long, she’s hooked. After a century of literary modernism, its central characters continue to haunt the pages of new work. Kevin Jackson‘s Constellation of Genius: 1922 – Modernism Year One (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) is novelly conceived, taking 1922 day by day, dropping […]
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Legalize Joyce!

  A June day in Dublin would be a fractal of Western civilization. – Kevin Birmingham Kevin Birmingham‘s splendid first book is so packed with smut hounds, tortured geniuses, anarchists, and iconoclasts that it’s hard to pinpoint where its greatest pleasures lie. Although ostensibly an account of the publication ordeal and legal furore surrounding one of the twentieth century’s greatest novels, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (The Penguin Press, 2014) casts a much wider net. As in Kevin Jackson’s excellent Constellation of Genius (reviewed here), there’s literary gossip aplenty. We first see one of its main characters, Ezra Pound, teaching W.B. Yeats to fence. Later, Ernest Hemingway teaches Pound to box and meets Joyce. The great Joyce, unable to see an assailant in a barroom quarrel, would instruct his rambunctious young friend, “Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!” From a present-day perspective, it’s also a valuable reminder of where we were, culturally, a mere century ago. “All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words,” wrote one of Ulysses‘s earliest reviewers, in London’s Sunday Express. Powerful censorship bodies on both sides of the Atlantic agreed, and between its publication date, […]
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