It's no small thing to have your book reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement.
Positively.
Alongside a book by Steven Barthelme.
Except Mark's new book of stories, The Incurables, gets, oh, several paragraphs of the review and Barthelme's gets, well, a lot less.
Because, as you probably know, Mark's book is pretty great; after all, it's not every collection that "deserves a lasting place among regional story cycles."
Yep. That's what the review says.
Sounds good to us.
Mark may indeed be our TLS champion. I do know that John H. Johnston's book, "English Poetry of the First World War," was half-heartedly reviewed in TLS when it was more closely controled by the "Times of London" (August 6, 1964, p. 11). The reviewer loathed his academic style but thought his content good enough to repay the learned societies that had subvented its research. That book came in for better treatment later when others wrote about its subject matter. In fact, John is cited in the Oxford bibliography of David Jones, with whom John corresponded. John's second book, "The Poet and the City: A Study in Urban Perspectives," (1984) was reviewed quite prominently and positively in TLS, leading John to say that he'd have his house up for sale, if he weren't ready to retire. Possibly, there were older scholars, such as John Harrington Cox and Henry Louis Chappell from way back in the day, whose considerable contributions to literary study at the time earned them such reviews, but I haven't researched this. In any case, such reviews have been rare at WVU, and it's really great to see a new commencement of them in Mark's work.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who knows of reviews in TLS I've forgotten, please let me know and I'll emend my comments. --Pat
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