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Reader's BlockAuthor: David Markson American Literature Series November 1996 193 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-132-1 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36 
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Book Description
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.
About the Author
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David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress was acclaimed by David Foster Wallace as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country." His other novels, including Reader's Block, Springer's Progress, and Vanishing Point, have expanded this high reputation. His novel The Ballad of Dingus Magee was made into the film Dirty Dingus Magee, which starred Frank Sinatra, and he is also the author of three crime novels. Born in Albany, New York, he has long lived in New York City. |
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Praise
"A book often dreamed about by the avant-garde but never seen . . . utterly fascinating."—Publishers Weekly"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
"In Reader's Block, David Markson has crafted a savvy metafictional game of Trivial Pursuit."—Boston Globe
"Deeply melancholy, suggestive, and moving . . . [A] remarkable book."—Kirkus Reviews
"David Markson's 'seminonfictional semifiction' is exhilarating, sorrowful and amazing. Indeed, a minor masterpiece."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"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."—Cups
"Reader's Block is tart and playful, and as you learn increasingly more about the narrator's solitary life, remarkably poignant."—Newsday's Favorite Books of '96
"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."—American Book Review