Reader's Block
In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind-literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities-the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials-including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides-David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.
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In Reader's Block, David Markson has crafted a savvy metafictional game of Trivial Pursuit.
David Markson's 'seminonfictional semifiction' is exhilarating, sorrowful and amazing. Indeed, a minor masterpiece.
If you read one book this year, read David Markson's new novel . . . A beautifully crafted condensation of language, Reader's Block is the poetic novel for century's end, recalling those great Modernist novels at century's beginning . . . Reader's Block is Markson's most refined example of his telescopic and allusive style. The reader enjoys the indelible language . . . The book is also downright fun for it is in part a collage of anecdotes from literary and art history, anecdotes that reveal the struggles of all writers and artists. This business of art is not a casual affair. Reader's Block is one of the purest books ever written, not a novel to taste but to ingest. We owe Markson for everything, for he is more than gifted and we, struggling readers, are more than blessed.
In giving form to his private imaginary, and accessing the texts of a culture as something other than an accumulating archive, Markson reminds us of how it is that a canon of books, itself an imaginary notion, can come to have a real existence in a living mind.
Deeply melancholy, suggestive, and moving . . . [A] remarkable book.
Reader's Block is, like all of David Markson's work, marvelously intelligent and beautifully wrought. It is also suffused with a rueful gaiety, the sort of humor characterized by Flann O'Brien as 'the handmaiden of sorrow and fear.' It's a wonderful book that will break your heart. --Gilbert Sorrentino
Stunning . . . one of the strangest, most compelling books you will ever read. --Rikki Ducornet
"Hypnotic... a profoundly rewarding read." -- Kurt Vonnegut
"Finally, a prose sequel to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This is really a work of genius."--Ann Beattie
"Hypnotic... a profoundly rewarding read."--Kurt Vonnegut
