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Fire the Bastards!Author: Jack Green Scholarly Series November 1992 88 pages, 9 x 6 Paperback, 1-56478-011-2 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $15.96 Paperback Temporarily Out of Stock |
Book Description
Fire the Bastards! is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions as a case study. Although this monumental novel is now generally regarded as one of the few indisputable milestones of contemporary American fiction, its original reviews were overwhelmingly negative.
Combining meticulous research with savage indignation, Green exposes the inaccuracies, prejudices, and outright incompetence of Gaddis's reviewers to argue that the review media is ill-equipped to deal with masterpieces of innovative fiction, much preferring safe, predictable books that reassure rather than question conventional literary expectations.
Despite his careful scholarship, Green is not a dispassionate commentator but an impassioned satirist, working in a rogue tradition that looks back to Swift's ferocious pamphlets. Originally published as a three-part series in his own magazine called newspaper—which Gilbert Sorrentino has described as "one of the authentic minor splendors of New York literary life in the late fifties and early sixties"—this is the first time Fire the Bastards! has appeared in book form. Gaddis scholar Steven Moore has written an introduction filling in the background to this unique work and comparing the book-reviewing media of today with that of the fifties.
About the Author
| Jack Green attended Princeton and worked for an insurance company before supporting himself full-time as a freelance proofreader. Seventeen issues of his newspaper appeared between 1957 and 1965, and since then he has published various chapbooks. He lives in New York's Greenwich Village. |  |
Praise
"That writers whose work is even a little outside the norms of the mummified familiar are almost invariably ill-served by reviewers afflicted with profound reading disabilities is a truism familiar even to cats and dogs. What a pleasure it is, then, to have Fire the Bastards!, the three 'William Gaddis issues' of Jack Green's unique and irreplaceable newspaper, one of the authentic minor masterpieces of the late fifties and early sixties. A witty, devastating, and justly contemptuous assault launched against the zombie reviewers who tried—out of, variously, malice, stupidity, ignorance, sloth, and a vast incompetence—to destroy The Recognitions, this relentlessly detailed reply razes all things idiotic. And the delight, after thirty years, of coming upon the names, as if in a bad dream, of these careless hacks, and realizing that virtually all of them have faded, laus Deo, into oblivion, may be thought of as a kind of bonus."—Gilbert Sorrentino"Thirty years later I can still remember hammering my knee in delight at Jack Green's brilliantly targeted outrage. Fire the Bastards! remains a crucial document in post-World War II American literature that absolutely belongs back in print."—David Markson
"It is wonderfully salutary and a cause for serious celebration that Dalkey Archive has brought out Jack Green's Fire the Bastards! in book form. Together with Steven Moore's up-to-date and on-the-money introduction, Fire the Bastards! constitutes a warning to careless critics and reviewers even as it justly demands (Payback Time!) tribute from the mob of amateur and professional critics who missed the boat with one of the most influential novels of our time. The new generation, no wiser than the last, will continue to miss boats and books. But, thanks to Fire the Bastards!, they will at least be twitchy, hearing indignant footsteps right behind them."—George Garrett
"[The reviewers] deserve to be scathed, just as Green's little book deserves to be reprinted, both for its insights into The Recognitions and for the disturbing light it sheds on today's reviewing establishment, with which the novel would have probably fared worse than it did in 1955."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"[Green] gives to his project a pure, focused energy. It's beautiful to witness. Hey, Jack Green, you were alive, man!"—Curtis White
"Green not only names reviewers and publications; the prose is meticulously cross-referenced, peppered thoroughly with direct quotations, dates, and bibliographical data. Vicious and hilarious, these issues of newspaper initiate a culture war worthy of Swift."—The Stranger
"This dissection of a body of contemporary criticism remains a challenge to critics and readers in its exposure of critical shorthand which serves deadline and can't rather than the work in question."—Book/Mark