Evan Dara: Reader Response
Reactions to the Works of Evan Dara
“Clear your to-read list and put [The Lost Scrapbook] at the top. An amazing mindblowing torrent, a Joycean Gaddisian Rushian Steinian Wallacian but ultimately only Daranian splendor. The book is a vortex of voices leading to the roaring silence of the burst eardrum of your mental ear.”
Yonina Hoffman (@yonina)
“To have authority and gain respect, future novels may need to simulate those books we have to heft and weigh, texts such as anthologies, manuals and encyclopedias. Or maybe not books at all but other performances such as magic acts and circuses, or even repositories of medieval manuscripts and oral histories, archives and museums. At the end of The Recognitions a composer finally plays his own music in a cathedral, hits a very difficult note, and brings the cathedral down on his head. Dara has taken a similar risk with his Beethoven-influenced novel of variations. Readers who wish to see books preserved will want to have this one…”
Tom LeClair, on The Lost Scrapbook
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Recent Posts
Snippets from The Lost Scrapbook
This is part of an experiment to share sonic snippets of Evan Dara’s work, starting with the beginning of The Lost Scrapbook. More than a few readers have likened the experience of reading Dara’s debut to listening to a radio where the stations change unexpectedly, with stories and voices that bump or blend into each…
The Lost Scrapbook Named Among “Great Books That Deserve to Be Better Known”
In a June 2026 roundup for The Conversation, literary journalist James Ley asked seven Australian literary scholars to nominate their favorite underappreciated book. Emmett Stinson, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English at Edith Cowan University, chose Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook. Stinson places the novel squarely alongside the major maximalist works of the 1990s,…
The Lost Scrapbook Wins at the Japan Translation Awards
We’re excited to announce that The Lost Scrapbook has just won the Grand Prize at the 11th Japan Translation Awards! On April 27, 2025, the Japan Translation Award committee met in Tokyo and named two works as recipients of this year’s Grand Prize. One of them was the Japanese translation of The Lost Scrapbook, carried…
Things Ain’t What They Seem: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life
by Gilbert Sorrentino [Note: This was originally included in the second issue of Context, which was published by the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 2004. While it is technically still available in the Wayback Machine, it seemed a shame to let this piece languish in digital exile. If requested, we will be swift in taking…
Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook: First Japanese Translation
It brings us immense pleasure to announce that Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook will be available in its first-ever Japanese translation this November, translated by the esteemed Yoshihiko Kihara. Known for its unique style—written without periods and narrated by countless anonymous voices—this novel has long been considered an “unread masterpiece.” Originally published in 1995, The…
William Gass’s Intro to Robert Coover’s The Public Burning
From William Gass’s introduction to the 1998 Grove Press edition of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning: “Written in the 1970s, published finally in 1977, about actual and imaginary events of June 1953, it could not be more current, more relevant, more right on than it is now (or whatever date the reader finds herself immured)….…
The Reader’s Role in Experimental Fiction
In the wilds of experimental fiction, the reader is not merely a passive recipient of story and structure but a co-conspirator in the act of creation, an often cross-eyed figure whose interpretive capabilities are summoned to fill the non-linear narrative gaps, resolve shady ambiguities, and imagine the text into meaning. The reader, in these instances,…
Guiding Mose Eakins, Part 2
I needed a framework, an organised structure for breaking down Evan Dara’s play Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins into its fixed and variable components. The solution was a large table, a gridded spreadsheet with time on the vertical axis.
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The Evan Dara Affinity 