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Daniel Green
Interests: Good writing, creative and critical.
Recent Activity
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All completed chapters of Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction can be found here in .pdf, here as a webpage, and here on its own website. More to come. Continue reading
Posted Feb 21, 2023 at The Reading Experience
Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction Daniel Green Sorrentino the Poet There is no question that Gilbert Sorrentino considered himself first of all to be a poet. He began his writing career not just writing but also reviewing and publishing poetry, most prominently in the little magazines he edited, Neon and Kulchur.... Continue reading
Posted Feb 20, 2023 at Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction
I have completed a new chapter of my short book, Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction, which appears below. You can also access a pdf version of this chapter here, as well as a web page version here. The previous chapters of the book can be found here: Sorrentino the Craftsman Aberration... Continue reading
Posted Feb 20, 2023 at The Reading Experience
Issue 5 of Unbeaten Paths now available. Under Review: Emily Hall, The Longcut (Dalkey Archive) Ansgar Allen, Wretch (Scism Neuronics), The Sick List (Boiler House Press), Plague Theatre (Equus Press) Mark De Silva, The Logos (Splice/Clash Books) Continue reading
Posted Nov 9, 2022 at The Reading Experience
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New supplementary site: Critic's Progress: Essays in Literature and Criticism collects and arranges my essays on the elements of literature, literary criticism, and literary study published on The Reading Experience and elsewhere. Continue reading
Posted Aug 26, 2022 at The Reading Experience
Inventing Literature (This essay originally appeared in American Book Review.) In his book In Plato’s Cave, Alvin Kernan describes a career crisis that he no doubt shared with many other literary scholars of his generation: The canon of great books, authors and their powerful imaginations, the formal perfection of the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 26, 2022 at Essays in Literature and Criticism
Going Online Fillips of Contempt, Wet Kisses—Literary Weblogs vs Print Media (This essay was delivered as a paper at the 2016 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900) While “surfing” the world wide web in late 2003, I began noticing certain websites—they looked more like online diaries—discussing books and... Continue reading
Posted Aug 23, 2022 at Essays in Literature and Criticism
Book Reviewing in America In her book Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press), former Boston Review editor Gail Pool writes: Readers dismayed by the lack of criticism in reviews won't find more of it in other coverage, most of which is promotion, sometimes... Continue reading
Posted Aug 14, 2022 at Essays in Literature and Criticism
Taking on Problems In the first chapter of his 2005 book, Realist Vision , Peter Brooks writes: With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte... Continue reading
Posted Aug 12, 2022 at Essays in Literature and Criticism
Style as Moral Failure Near the end of her life, Angela Carter said, "I've got nothing against realism. . .[b]ut there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality. I would like, I would really like... Continue reading
Posted Aug 9, 2022 at Essays in Literature and Criticism
The History of Change In a post on his blog, Ron Silliman argues that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation... Continue reading
Posted Aug 6, 2022 at Essays in Literature and Criticism
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New supplementary site: Critic's Progress: Readings and Reviews collects and arranges my reviews and critical essays published on The Reading Experience and elsewhere. Continue reading
Posted Jul 30, 2022 at The Reading Experience
New Ways of Composing a Novel This review orginally appeared in 3:AM Magazine.) Romanian novelist Dumitru Tsepeneag would seem to be among those post-communist East European writers whose fiction, as if in leaving the legacy of socialist realism as far behind as possible embraces its perceived opposite, could be described... Continue reading
Posted Jul 22, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Extreme and Disorienting Experiences (This review originally appeared in Full Stop.) That The Unmapped Country, a selection of “stories and fragments” by the English writer Ann Quin not previously published in book form, is likely to give this writer a higher profile than she has until now enjoyed will unquestionably... Continue reading
Posted Jul 22, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Making Believe Rikki Ducornet’s novels published in the 21st century--so far Gazelle (2003), Netsuke (2011), and Brightfellow (2016)--have discernibly evolved away from the more purely fabular kind of fiction—often veering into the surreal or fantastic—that characterized her previous work, toward more naturalistic settings and more recognizably “lifelike” characters. Although these... Continue reading
Posted Jul 13, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
The School of Lish The Resourceful Accumulation of Sentences If currently there is a writer whose work represents the cutting edge in advancing the art of fiction beyond prevailing conventions and stale assumptions, in my view that writer is Gary (now Garielle) Lutz. Lutz’s short stories indeed question the presumption... Continue reading
The Materiality of the Medium (This essay originally appeared in Kenyon Review Online.) In many ways Steve Tomasula’s Once Human (FC2) is a very good introduction to the work of this conspicuously unconventional writer for those who are either unfamiliar with his previous work or have shied away from it... Continue reading
Posted Jun 25, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Postmodern Confusions The term “postmodern” in American fiction was initially prompted by the work of self-reflexive writers such as John Barth, William Gass, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The term has persisted as a catch-all way of designating works of fiction that seem anti-realist or don’t conform to generally accepted storytelling norms.... Continue reading
Posted Jun 22, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Nobody’s Experimental Novel (This essay originally appeared in Denver Quarterly.) No doubt the most pressing questions concerning the fiction of William Melvin Kelley are not about its merits, which are considerable and readily enough apparent, but have to be those related to the circumstances of its “rediscovery”: Why did Kelley... Continue reading
Posted Jun 21, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Hiding: Looking for Henry Green In 1959, Terry Southern conducted (for the Paris Review) the most substantial extant interview with the British novelist Henry Green. Southern actually did most of the talking (almost as if he was a Henry Green character), with Green rather diffidently agreeing with most of Southern’s2... Continue reading
Posted Jun 15, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Contextualized Naturalism: The Artfulness of Russell Banks's Affliction Perhaps because American fiction has always been especially animated by the opposing tendencies toward realism on the one hand and fabulation on the other, toward the "novel" as developed in Europe and toward what Hawthorne insisted was "romance," writers' allegiances to either... Continue reading
Posted Jun 14, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Disassembling Donald Barthelme (This essay originally appeared in The Quarterly Conversation.) It was never clear why Donald Barthelme chose to re-publish his stories in collected, compendium editions, first in Sixty Stories and then in Forty Stories. The very titles of these books obscured the playful and distinctive signposts provided by... Continue reading
Gilbert Sorrentino The Clutter of the Vacuous World Often enough a good way to get a quick introduction to an author’s work is to start with one or another collection of that writer’s short fiction. Frequently the short stories will provide a helpful if preliminary sense of the writer’s preoccupations,... Continue reading
These are reviews of books by more widely known writers. Although in some cases the works discussed could be called "mainstream," at least in terms of their availability to the general reader (you could find them in most bookstores), many of them are again formally or stylistically unconventional, albeit in... Continue reading
Posted May 30, 2022 at Critic's Progress: Readings & Reviews
Taken together, Mark McGurl's three books, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), and Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) read like the author's attempt to perceive the entire... Continue reading
Posted May 30, 2022 at The Reading Experience