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“... drafts, second thoughts, cancelled readings and emendations), accompanied by a fanfare of notes; Susan Shatto’s edition of ‘Maud’, devoting yet more minute attention to this single work (it is unhappily labelled ‘a definitive edition’ – what on earth is the indefinite article doing there?); and the highly-praised Lang-Shannon edition of ...”

“... a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing nickname ‘Captain Fiction’. The ...”

“... established the Clinic for the Treatment and Study of Nervous and Difficult Children in Notting Hill. The child didn’t replace the neurotic; the neurotic re-emerged within the child.Klein’s model of the mind disorganised the difference between childhood and adulthood. Her eventual understanding of the mental positions between which we continually ...”

“... same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story of these antiquarians and what they learned from the ruins that obsessed them. Their sensibility, as she shows, was itself ancient. In the age of Augustus, as Rome became a marble city, poets looked back with ...”

“... a volley probably directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri Ford. Twenty years before Susan Sontag insisted that the camp sensibility had ‘hardly broken into print’, Duncan was arguing in print that the time for camp was over. In the name of gay rights, and in line with his universalist instincts, Duncan suggested that the appropriate attitude ...”

“... ought to join them, or rather change them and use them in surprising ways, like the poets Geoffrey Hill and Bob Dylan, who is admired for altering ‘Take it to heart’ to ‘Take it to your heart.’ No cliché is irredeemable; we should seize on them, give them, so to speak, a new loss of life, and so contribute to the renovation of the language. Another ...”

“... campaign posted a fifty-second ad in which, helped by a cartoon of two boys climbing a hill, she explains the difference between equality (‘equal opportunity’ backed by non-discrimination laws) and ‘equity’ (the equal finish that is assured by a truly equal start). The Biden-Harris combination must have been meant to assure voters of ...”

“... of translations of Giono into English recently; along with the ones under review here, we have had Hill (NYRB, 2016), Melville (NYRB, 2017) and Occupation Journal (Archipelago, 2020). I’m not sure what this means, but I hope it suggests a new attention to a once famous writer, and all of the books are well worth a first read or a return. The Open Road and ...”

“... a gap between an experience and its representation is only superficially similar to that of Fanny Hill, when she comments on the monotony of erotic narrative as compared with erotic experience: her point is that the language and even the actions of love-making have a sameness which cannot do justice to the sensations of pleasure. Her priorities are in other ...”

“... up the other émigré East Coast families, round up his own family, and then dominate them all. Susan Wilkins, one of the voices in the book: ‘My God, the father was something! A cross between Mr America and General Patton.’ Fuzzy would stride around, in a white bikini, and pronounce, in the sunshine. No one was allowed around who wasn’t ...”

“... major novels, though the work is undatable, Austen wrote an excellent unromantic story. ‘Lady Susan’ is the epistolary account, at novella length, of a charming and rather brilliant (though bad) woman’s amatory adventures in stuffy aristocratic households. Like and unlike a foreshadowing of Henry James’s The Awkward Age, ‘Lady ...”

“... from the bonds of marriage, he took up not only with Assia Wevill but also with a woman called Susan Alliston, who is mentioned in ‘18 Rugby Street’, in Birthday Letters, as ‘holding me from my telephone/Those nights you would most need me’. Alliston, who also wrote and published her own poetry, and was interested, like Hughes, in anthropology, was ...”

“... in the corridors of power: some of the Moonie ‘sisters’ even gained permanent jobs on Capitol Hill, notably Susan Bergman, who became an assistant to the House Speaker, Carl Albert. Before long various Moonie front organisations had won the willing patronage of numerous conservative Congressmen and Senators ...”

“... was largely an autodidact, although unlike Blackmur he did have a good Classical education at the Hill School and then at Princeton. Wilson never took an advanced degree and, indeed, later made organisations of professional literary scholars like the Modern Language Association the target of his scorn and contempt. Wilson’s well-off family background was in ...”

“... and in Greenock were empty behind locked doors, with not even a sticker to identify them. Up the hill in Boglestone, the Orange Lodge looked just as it used to when I was a candidate: a low concrete bunker with bombproof grids over its windows. Nobody about. But this isn’t a ghost town. Greenock is struggling into recovery now. It is a place built for ...”