Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have seen me say a lot of nice things about Issues 1 and 2 of the journal/magazine The Point. I think I put it about as well as I’m going to when I called it a “mixture of literary and cultural criticism, written in a learned but far from academic prose.”
Issue 3 has just rolled off the presses, and there are some offerings on the website. Issue 3 also includes my essay on appropriative literature (currently only available in the print edition), which deals somewhat critically with Jonathan Lethem’s much-praised essay on appropriation in literature, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” and David Shield’s much-praised book on the same, Reality Hunger. It also extols the virtues of Manuel Puig as an appropriator ahead of his time, and as someone the likes of Lethem and Shields could learn some things from.
I think it’s one of the better things I’ve written in a while, in no small part due to The Point’s editorial staff.
Of course, if you’d like to see the ahead-of-its-time literature of Manuel Puig for yourself, now is a great time to do so: Dalkey’s reissue of The Buenos Aires Affair, with my introduction, publishes in less than two weeks. It will join Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and Heartbreak Tango, also reissued by Dalkey.
There’s also quite a bit about Puig and his novels in The Subversive Subscribe, Suzanne Jill Levine’s book about translating many of the greatest novelists of 20th-century Latin America. The Quarterly Conversation excerpted part of the book here.
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Scott,
Thank you for the heads-up about this. I picked up both Heartbreak Tango and The Buenos Aires Affair last evening, and have already read through your introduction to the latter, and am looking forward to diving into Puig. I’ve only ever read Kiss of the Spider Woman–and loved it–and in fact, back when I was in undergraduate school studying theatre and literature, I performed a monologue from Kiss–directly from the book, not the film or play. It’s a beautifully modulated, very tension-filled novel, and I love that it is structured almost entirely in dialogue.