Last week, Ben Roth published an essay on The Millions entitled “Against Readability,” which was provocative in a fairly predictable way. But as he drew lines between the praiseworthy (e.g. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder) and the forgettable (Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch), it pushed a button that prompted a version of this kneejerk comment: As someone whoContinue reading “Against Readability?”
Category Archives: Evan Dara
El Cuaderno Perdido: An Interview with José Luis Amores
An interview with Jose Luis Amores, who translated Evan Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook.
The Easy Chain
I’m in the midst of a re-read of Dara’s The Easy Chain, which has been slowed by the furious underlining and marginalianizing that the story demands. There are threads that I plan to pursue in future posts (e.g. Has there been a better novel involving Chicago in the last 20 years? The parallels between the riseContinue reading “The Easy Chain”
Flee: A Playlist of Sorts
While I don’t visit Largehearted Boy’s site as often as I did a few years ago, I’m not ashamed to concede that one of the primary reasons I would publish a novel is so that I could cook up a submission to his long-running Book Notes series, where authors create and discuss a playlist that relates to theirContinue reading “Flee: A Playlist of Sorts”
Flann O’Brien and Secured Reputations
Last week, Mark O’Connell shared a quote attributed to Anthony Burgess about the Irish shapeshifter, Flann O’Brien, which O’Connell opined was the “greatest blurb of all time”: “If we don’t cherish the work of Flann O’Brien we are stupid fools who don’t deserve to have great men. Flann O’Brien is a very great man.” It calls to mind SteveContinue reading “Flann O’Brien and Secured Reputations”
El Cuaderno Perdido
Thanks in large part to the efforts of its tireless publisher, Palido Fuego, links to numerous reviews and essays for El Cuaderno Perdido have been added to the Resources page. We’ve adopted a stylistically inconsistent variation of MLA to display the information, which will need to be cleaned up over time. But, for now, ourContinue reading “El Cuaderno Perdido”
Resources and Miscellany
While the launch of the site on Sunday was somewhat inadvertent (we prematurely plugged into Twitter without realizing what happens when you hit the Publish button), work continues behind the scenes. One of the first orders of business was to stake out an area to collect and compile links to books, articles, and sites thatContinue reading “Resources and Miscellany”
Something Always Going On
It has been almost 3 and a half years since Evan Dara published his third novel, Flee, which confirmed something that a small but steadfast circle of committed readers already understood: that Dara is as good as any living American novelist.
The Evan Dara Affinity 