I’ve been dipping in and out of a lot of books lately, partly for research and partly because my schedule’s been a bit too hectic to dig into any one project for very long (though War and Peace is still on my list):

• Faulkner Absalom, Absalom. I reread about 2/3 of this one and it’s great. I’m working with this idea of the dictator novel, which is primarily a Latin American form but which I think translates to American literature in the form of a larger-than-life character obsessed with power. For instance, Moby-Dick or All the King’s Men. Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s story is another one.
• Donald Platt, Dirt Angels. My old poetry professor at Purdue has a new book of poems (well, 2009, so not that new). Like his previous collection, My Father Says Grace, he uses a three-stanza line (primarily) and writes about his family. His poems about his daughters are particularly affecting.
• Bret Lott, Jewel. This is the only novel by my undergraduate writing professor that I haven’t read, and it’s also his most famous (it was on Oprah). I tend to put off an author’s supposed masterpiece. For instance, Suttree was the last McCarthy I read. Not sure if that’s because I want to save it or because I feel like I need to be extra attentive. Either way, Lott’s novel is good, but a bit hard to stomach in places. The subject is a woman’s last child, who has Down’s Syndrome (opens in the ’40s and spans forward). Very Steinbeckian, if that’s a word.
• James Dickey, Selected Poems. Dickey is an interesting writer, and he created a mythology about himself. Allegedly, he would walk up to pretty young woman and ask, “Do you want to fuck a poet?” The NY Times says “he slept with too many women; he drank oceanically.” I’m interested in him beyond his books because he spent many years working in advertising, and said he spent his days selling his soul and his nights trying to buy it back. I can relate. I’m not a poetry critic, so I don’t have much to say about his poems, but I think it was in his Paris Review interview where he said he was a bit skeptical of “southern literature,” about the trope of the alcoholic father and the troublemaking son and the slatternly daughter, but he did think landscape was one way to tap into that realm. His poems do have great imagery.
• Speaking of, the Paris Review released all of their archived interviews from the past 60 years. Good way to kill an afternoon.
• On my bookshelf: Paul Harding’s Tinkers, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Marianne Boruch’s Into the Blue Pharmacy, and Dostoevsky’s Demons.
• Finally, this year’s National Book Award winner was Jaimy Gordon’s The Lords of Misrule, which was published by an independent press. That’s two major awards going to small press books this year, a good sign for the future of literature I hope. Two books I’m interested in reading from the small presses: Charles Dodd White’s Lambs of Men and the new anthology of Appalachian short fiction, Degrees of Elevation.