Richard Stern

Letter

In Quarantine

2 April 1987

SIR: The old wisdom is to ignore stupid reviewers. Now and then, however, it serves to post quarantine signs. So a brief note about John Sutherland, who managed to misquote, mis-attribute intentions, misuse the language and mistake the very title of the book he was reviewing, all within three hundred and fifty-odd words – cf., his review of The Position of the Body, LRB, 2 April. Sinners usually...

Poets and Pretenders

John Sutherland, 2 April 1987

James Atlas’s The Great Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America’s poète maudit who died...

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Humiliations

Michael Irwin, 4 December 1980

In the introduction to his Collected Short Stories Kingsley Amis strongly implies that the genre is not at present in a healthy state. He claims that subsidisation by the Arts Council, or other...

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