3 a.m. post...

Through a tragic production error they seem to have substituted the cover for an Italian-language novelization of Cabaret. Otherwise it looks great. —Lev Grossman on the Italian edition of The Magicians

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Check out Lev's terrific piece on a pre-Virginia Leonard Woolf and his genre-loving roomie in the new Believer! It's great (and you can read it all online)! While we're at it, let's look at the rest of the May issue...Is it any good? YES. It's great, in fact!

How great? Nick Hornby returns!...Maureen Howard and Joanna Scott in conversation...Nabokov fans need to read C. Namwali Serpell's piece on "How I ruined Lolita for myself"...Lovely essay on the pleasures of Mimesis by Annie Julia Wyman...reviews by Rick Moody, Stephen Burt, Ken Tucker, and others...Interviews with Daniel Clowes (Wilson, which is great), Lawrence Schiller (name will ring a bell if you've read The Executioner's Song)...stuff about ninjas...Greil Marcus...Jack Pendarvis...and much more!

(Speaking of the Believer—two of the essays in last October's issue have been selected for the bext edition of Best American Travel Writing, including a Sebaldian epic on Dracula tourism by my former student, Avi Davis!)

The first and the last

A Lover’s Almanac is performative, dizzying, richly layered, like some fabulous brocade. By the time The Rags of Time emerges, the writing has taken a long journey, through the bittersweet and intoxicating Big As Life, through the sad rich quiet of The Silver Screen. Each volume succeeds in transforming its season into something foreign, unknown. And, like the seasons, each book expands and alters the stories that came before it. Because the seasons are cyclical instead of linear, this is, potentially, an infinite process. At the end of the forth book I wanted to begin all over again-I wanted to revise my reading with re-reading. What could the first volume say about the last? What could the early lives tell me about the later ones?

—Emily Austin on Maureen Howard's The Rags of Time, in The Faster Times

Too many writers are dying

1. John Leonard archives at New York magazine and at The New York Review of Books and at Harper's.

2. My thoughts on an evening last year in which he helped Richard Powers perform a piece called "The Moving Finger," and then interviewed him onstage at the Morgan Library.

3. On Maureen Howard (Big as Life) in the NYTBR: "From sex and money as family secrets, to marriage and children as botched experiments, to art and history as magnetic compass points, to writing and teaching as the calisthenics of moral intelligence."

4. The eternal blurb (JL on One Hundred Years of Solitude): "You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. . . With a single bound, Gabriel Garcia Marquez leaps onto the stage with Gunter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov. Dazzling." (A blurb that's been as influential as any book to me—"the mind on fire"!)

5. I always loved this 1997 piece, from The Nation, which contains the line: "I review Atlantis books once a decade, whether they need it or not." (Shortly after reading this piece, I began not ignoring Atlantis books that entered my field of vision...now I have many and I have finished none.)

6. This doesn't mean anything: When he talked about The Believer on Sunday Morning, years ago, they did a close-up on a page from inside....it was my Portis piece. This doesn't mean anything but of course in my mind I pretended it did.

UPDATE: Renata Adler's Speedboat is another touchstone for me...or was I perhaps once again thinking of a JL blurb? Here's his review, plus the rest of his Harper's archive.

Big as the size of thoughts

Part two of my Astral Weeks column exploring Endless Things, the final book in John Crowley's Aegypt tetralogy, is now up at the L.A. Times. (Here is part one.)

Endless Things reminded me of the closing line in...either Nicholson Baker's The Size of Thoughts, or Maureen Howard's Big as Life (part of her ongoing tetralogy)—half my books are still in boxes so I can't look it up: "Books open, then they close."

Dizzyforum

New Bookforum is out—with a strong showing by known Dizzyheads! And my mentor Maureen Howard (Dizzyhead status: unknown!) reviews Ha Jin.