Sheer Fiction Four

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Clothbound, 232 pages, incl. index, 6 x 9", 2007, 978-0-929701-76-9


INCLUDES AN INDEX TO VOLUMES I-IV


This fourth and final installment of Paul West's collected literary essays begins with two paeans for departed friends — the novelist John Hawkes and the astronomer Carl Sagan — and a review of a book about famous literary suicides. Then West launches into a lengthy cross-examination of Nobel Prize novelist J.M. Coetzee's curious employment of West himself as a character in the novel Elizabeth Costello. That alone is worth the ticket. But the sixteen essays which follow record the distances between mimetic projection of fictive personae and the "visionary plunge into what cannot be kept out of the mind"— dalliance, in other words, versus necessity. Here, predictably, West is at his best. Subjects range from an epic poem of the Titanic to the teaching of Samuel Beckett, and from a meeting with Borges to the complexities of Faulkner. West considers the future of the novel, conducts inquiries of the works of William Gass and Bradford Morrow, and offers asides about his own working methods and how he came to write certain of his books. Fittingly, Sheer Fiction IV includes an extensive index to all four volumes of Sheer Fiction published over the past eighteen years, making this volume indispensable to any reader exploring West's triumphant oeuvre.


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  • Reviews
  • Contents
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"Thirteen years after the previous installment, Paul West’s wonderful Sheer Fiction series here comes to an end: four volumes spanning three decades of essays, reviews, and occasional writing, and together in excess of 800 pages. For a writer like West, who makes no bones about how easily his work comes to him, who slyly admits to having “two-thirds done of a three-thousand-page novel conceived in defiance and written in joy”—and this in addition to his published work, whose quantity, diversity, and near-miraculous consistency of quality could easily drown the unwary reader—this number may not seem particularly impressive. Given, however, that these are only West’s uncollected pieces—sporadic emanations in response to an essay commission or review assignment—West’s achievement, and that of the Sheer series, seems all the more staggering. This volume in particular reads not as an assortment of leftovers, but as a chapter in an autobiography—and not just the autobiography of a man, but of his tools: West’s prose regarding itself with a measure of well-earned arrogance as its author pauses to praise William H. Gass, have dinner with Borges, or poke holes in J. M. Coetzee. The Borges piece is particularly delicious, with West making us a gift of his and the great man’s improbably perfect repartee on De Quincey, the “Boom,” and the scurrilities of academia. Equally tantalizing is the tiny scrap we’re offered from an abandoned book, a Hyde to the Jekyll of West’s The Secret Life of Words, which would have catalogued the author’s glosses on a number of writers’ pet concepts (Joyce’s “epiphany,” Proust’s “involuntary memory”). West has been doing his duty replenishing the English language so consistently and well for so long now that, in light of his recent illness, one could be forgiven for fearing for the future of the word in a world where he is silent. With Sheer Fiction complete, however, and The Shadow Factory, his 'aphasic memoir,' on the way, we can rest assured that the world, and the word, are for the moment safe in the hands of their champion perceiver." -- Review of Contemporary Fiction

"In his many works of fiction, memoir, and criticism, West proves himself to be a writer blessed with a cheerfully mordant wit, an acrobatic way with words, ebullient learnedness, and a deep if wry perception of the human condition. Each previous Sheer Fiction volume has offered pleasure, revelation, and provocation, and now, in West's fourth collection of biting literary essays, he again covers a remarkable breadth and complexity of terrain. . . ." -- Booklist, review by Donna Seaman 
CONTENTS
"John Hawkes"
"A Missing Star"
"Final Drafts"
"The Novelist and the Hangman"
"The Castle of Indolence"
"Drowning as One of the FIne Arts"
"The Fool of Light"
"In the Anus of the Wallaby"
"Wording the World"
"Evaporating Disagreeables"
"About Caliban's Filibuster"
"Beckett"
"A Visit from Borges"
"Faulkner's Aerial Surf"
"Writing to Busoni"
"Backlash Against the Novel"
"At-Swim Among the Noble Gasses"
"Of Morrow and Tomorrow"
"The Dubiology is Etymous"
"Linguistic Islands: An Abandoned Project"
Index to Volumes I-IV