Reader's Block

Reader's Block


A Salon "Book of the Year" - 1996



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.

Details

Title Reader's Block
Author David Markson
Title First Published 01 November 1996
Format Paperback
Nb of pages 193 p.
ISBN-10 1-56478-132-1
ISBN-13 9781564781321
Publication Date 01 November 1996
Nb of pages 193
Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.
List Price $12.95
 

Reviews

Press Reviews

Complete Review
We certainly recommend this book very highly.

Publishers Weekly
A book often dreamed about by the avant-garde but never seen . . . utterly fascinating.

Salon
Hypnotic. Not a novel at all in the usual sense, Reader's Block is a brilliant accumulation of references and allusions ("Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck," "Tony
...more


Boston Globe
In Reader's Block, David Markson has crafted a savvy metafictional game of Trivial Pursuit.

Kirkus Reviews
Deeply melancholy, suggestive, and moving . . . [A] remarkable book.

Washington Post Book World
David Markson's 'seminonfictional semifiction' is exhilarating, sorrowful and amazing. Indeed, a minor masterpiece.

Cups
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
...more


Newsday (Favorite Books of '96)
Reader's Block is tart and playful, and as you learn increasingly more about the narrator's solitary life, remarkably poignant.

American Book Review
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.

Kirkus Reviews
Deeply melancholy, suggestive, and moving . . . [A] remarkable book.



Quotations

Hypnotic . . . a profoundly rewarding read.
-Kurt Vonnegut

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

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Genres : Fiction : Jewish-American
Genres : Fiction : United States and Canada
Countries : United States of America


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