Texas Inmate No. 1385412 ordered a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. When it arrived, the novel was rerouted to a relative in Austin, after a prison inspector determined that it might “encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior” and be “detrimental to the offender’s rehabilitation.” The disqualifying passage, which appears on Page 39, describes an oral-sex contest in . . .
“My father showed me his library, which seemed to me infinite…” Habitus translates a 1984 Borges interview. (Via.)
Sophie Ratcliffe likens Wood’s How Fiction Works to a satirical James tale in which heaven is “a sort of kindergarten.”
In the current Oxford American, David Payne charges that the Northeastern publishing establishment disdains Southern writing. Partly this is a result, he contends, of economics and demographics, but mostly it is due to the “otherness” of the region. Some of this warmed-over lit-crit lingo grates, especially when placed in service of some strained and troubling arguments about race, but I . . .
Those “Modern Love” columns I never read on Sundays are being regurgitated as books now.