For fans of Gabriel Josipovici's fiction, Christmas comes two month's early this year. In the same week in late October two different publishers issue two different works. While Carcanet releases the new and selected stories in Heart's Wings with its perfect and appropriate jacket design, CB Editions has the novel Only Joking.
This is a novel with a curious publishing history, having been translated into German as Nur Ein Scherz (see the link for a translation of Der Spiegel's review) before appearing in English. Literary bloggers may also like to note that the front page blurb is from Tales from the Reading Room, one of our own. In the same review, Victoria Best makes the important point that "whereas most great literature calls on gravitas to give it authority, the weighty burden of hefty concerns, strenuously raised, Josipovici fuels his narratives with celeritas, the playful swiftness of sleight of hand. It's a daring trick he never fails to pull off."
Of course, a month or more before these, Yale UP is also publishing What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Posts
Thank you so much for introducing me to the writings of Josipovici. I’ve been working my way through his earlier critical writings and have just started one of his novels. His analyses of Modernism and Post-Modernism are wonderfully astute – at least in those works I have read so far. I too am frustrated by the lack of engagement with the possibilities of fiction in recent years – particularly in the literary cultures that operate in English.
ReplyDeletecheers,
jen
--
http://absurdenticements.blogspot.com/