Ebook: What to Read (and Not): Essays and Reviews

These essays and reviews are mostly about literary fiction published in the last ten years and are written from the perspective of a fan of the McElroy/Coover/DeLillo axis or, more recently, the Powers/Vollmann/Wallace axis. The review-essays include pieces on all of the National Book Award fiction finalists of the last five years. Reviews selected here first appeared in Electronic Book Review, the Barnes & Noble Review, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, Bookforum, the Nation, the American Book Review, the Daily Beast, and other national periodicals. Taken together, the essays and reviews comment on the state of literary culture & mdash;the fiction division & mdash;in America. Also included are several personal essays about the development of the author from Vermont woodsman to Brooklyn wordsman. & ldquo;Tom LeClair & rsquo;s reviews are among the most thoughtful I have read and continue to read and among the most intelligent; they bring with them an experienced point-of-view and a seriousness of purpose equal to those of any reviewer in America. & rdquo; & mdash;Harold Augenbraum, director, National Book Foundation & ldquo;Tom LeClair is a consistently reliable reviewer with the bona fides of a celebrated critic. As a reader who laments, & lsquo;So many books; so little time, & rsquo; I feel called upon to thank him virtually every month for reading the books I won & rsquo;t have to get. More important, a book that passes muster with Tom LeClair is a must read. Infallibly accurate and articulately focused, he provides an admirable service to the world of literary fiction. & rdquo; & mdash;Neil D. Isaacs, author of more than twenty books and the forthcoming The Triumph of Artifice: Treasures of Twentieth-Century Narrative & ldquo;While most review pages are weightless & mdash;drawing together gauzy, breathless praise or mildly voiced dissatisfaction & mdash;Tom LeClair has spent forty years expanding the load-bearing capacity of the literary review to more accurately measure novelistic achievement. What to Read (and Not) crystallizes that project and lays out the contours for a new, more rigorously envisioned map of contemporary fiction. But while LeClair is one of the best guides to the territory, What to Read doesn & rsquo;t just tell you which landmarks to see and which to skip; this book is also a model of how to read: LeClair & rsquo;s reviews are a crash course in the physics of literature, equally comfortable tracing large intellectual investments as gauging a novel & rsquo;s microfelicities & mdash;deftly decoding the shape of sentences, the hidden histories of words. Because it will sharpen your sense of what literature can do, and because LeClair & rsquo;s characteristic intelligence runs like a watermark through all these pieces, What to Read is a must read. & rdquo; & mdash;Stephen J. Burn & ldquo;Tom LeClair is one of our most perceptive readers of contemporary fiction. He has written about William Gass, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and Stanley Elkin, among others, with his own deep passion for difficult books. & rdquo; & mdash;Jerome Charyn A Duke PhD in English, Tom LeClair was a National Book Award judge for fiction in 2005. He is the author of two books on contemporary American fiction (In the Loop and The Art of Excess), five novels (Passing Off, Well-Founded Fear, Passing On, The Liquidators, and Passing Through), and hundreds of essays and reviews in literary quarterlies such as the Paris Review, Witness, and TriQuarterly, and in periodicals such as the Atlantic, Bookforum, the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, the Barnes & Noble Review, and many others. He is also the coeditor, with Larry McCaffery, of Anything Can Happen, a book of interviews with American novelists. For his criticism, he has received a Pushcart Prize and the Margaret Church award from Modern Fiction Studies. The Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati for many years, he is now a freelance writer living in New York City, where he is known as Professor Ping Pong.