A new Keeler mystery

My review of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters is now up on the Bookforum site. Thank you to my editor, Michael Miller, for forcing me to write it!

One thing that got left on the cutting-room floor: For the birth of my second child, the only reading matter I brought to the hospital was...an issue of Bookforum! It was the one with Samuel Beckett wearing shorts on the cover.

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I did a double-take when I saw (via Facebook) that I was in yet another issue of the Asian American Literary Review. Just yesterday I remembered that I had published a piece in the AALR called "Chinese Whispers: On Writing/Not Writing Asian American Literature." So what was this other article by me? It's "vintage Park"—my review of Harry Stephen Keeler's strange, wildly entertaining, ethnic-studies-ready Y. Cheung, Business Detective (1939). In the piece, I reflect on an odd resemblance it bears to a story by Nabokov. I'm happy to see it reprinted. (It originally appeared in 2000—remember 2000?—in issue 30 of the Keeler News.)

(This has got to be one of the worst Keeler jackets. But it's a terribly interesting book.)

1,000,000

AJRMS on a Dizzies fave: Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance

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The latest Keeler News (which includes a great Keeler parody by Ken Keeler—no relation to HSK!) tipped me off to Graham Self's short film adaptation of "Strange Romance," the tale-within-a-tale in Y. Cheung, Business Detective.

Watch it here:



Curiously, Self made the movie without having had the chance to read "Strange Romance"; he knew of it only via the aforementioned (Keeler fan) Ken Keeler's commentary on a episode of Futurama.