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Daniel Green
Interests: Good writing, creative and critical.
Recent Activity
What's Good For Us: The Legacy of Wayne Booth's "Ethical Criticism"
Wayne Booth’s scholarly apologia on behalf of “ethical criticism” in his 1988 book, The Company We Keep (still the most well-known defense of such criticism written by a modern academic critic), is not a plea for the upholding of “morality” in literature—or so, at least, does Booth want to assure... Continue reading
Posted 3 days ago at The Reading Experience
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Best of The Reading Experience
This blog has been around for a pretty long time now, and, together with the essays and reviews I have published in other venues, I have accumulated a sizable number of reviews, critical readings, and essays over this time. In an effort to make as many of these visible to... Continue reading
Posted Jun 30, 2025 at The Reading Experience
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Maybe I'm Just a Bad Person
According to Elif Shafak, fiction "encourages empathy, oneness, pluralism, wisdom and understanding, especially in these awfully fractured times." I think of all the fiction I have read and ask myself how often what I have read made me think I was accomplishing one of these goals. Never have I actually... Continue reading
Posted Jun 22, 2025 at The Reading Experience
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British Experimental Fiction
For American readers, in considering the development of "experimental" fiction during the 1960s and after, we are most likely to focus mainly on American writers- the postmodernists and their successors (the latter probably less well-known than the first generation of postmodernists such as John Barth or Robert Coover.) In this... Continue reading
Posted Jun 15, 2025 at The Reading Experience
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Sorrentino Book (Coming Soon)
Here are completed chapters of my book-length career study of Gilbert Sorrentino, tentatively titled Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. In finished form, the book will consist of critical analysis of all of Sorrentino's fiction from his first novel, The Sky Changes (1966), to his posthumously published The Abyss of Human Illusion... Continue reading
Posted May 27, 2025 at The Reading Experience
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The Limits of Coherence
It is hard to imagine that many readers of John Trefry's massive novel, Massive, would attempt to read every word in the book (There really are neither sentences nor paragraphs to "read" in the conventional sense, so it finally is a question of registering each word before moving to the... Continue reading
Posted Mar 12, 2025 at The Reading Experience
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Disciplinary Bedrock
Simon During notes, in an essay appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that "There’s a conservative turn happening in literary studies, although it hasn’t received much public attention." By "conservative turn," During means not a sudden switch from a currently ascendant left-wing political agenda to a more right-wing perspective... Continue reading
Posted Jan 19, 2025 at The Reading Experience
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Zombie Zoo
It is hard to say whether Samuel Emmer, the protagonist of James Elkins's Weak in Comparison to Dreams, should be regarded as a "reliable" narrator of his story. On the one hand, there is no reason to believe he is telling us a false story about his experiences as a... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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Damaged by Reality
John Madera's collection of stories, Nervosities, is not "experimental" in that it rejects most readers' expectations of form in fiction: Most of the stories feature well-developed characters from whose relatively accessible points of view (both first-person and 3rd-person "free indirect") the events in the stories are related. Although these are... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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The Shape of His Departure
Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned,... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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The Shape of His Departure
Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned,... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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0
The Shape of His Departure
Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned,... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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0
The Shape of His Departure
Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned,... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2024 at The Reading Experience
Comment
0
The Shape of His Departure
Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned,... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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Gone South
On the surface, Babak Lakghomi's South takes on the characteristic features of conventional allegory. Predominantly emphasizing narrative, it tells the story of a quasi-innocent protagonist (innocent in his understanding of the true dangers lurking in the world he inhabits) who undertakes a journey (in this case, to the "south") that,... Continue reading
Posted Dec 22, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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The Fictional Self
Sheila Heti is known as a writer who seems to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in the three novels that brought her to prominence: How Should a Person Be? (2012), Motherhood (2018), and Pure Colour (2022). This strategy underpins the mode that has commonly come to be known... Continue reading
Posted Dec 22, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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Repetition Compulsion
It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, "postmodern," has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire... Continue reading
Posted Dec 21, 2024 at On Experimental Fiction
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The Dustbin of Literary History
The proposition that academic literary criticism has by now become a discipline that is no longer much interested in the literary seems to me indisputable. If "theory" initially diverted the critic's attention away from literature as a subject sufficient to itself as a "field" of inquiry, the modes of critical... Continue reading
Posted Dec 12, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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Repetition Compulsion
It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, "postmodern," has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire... Continue reading
Posted Oct 29, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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New Supplemental Site
Posted Aug 25, 2024 at The Reading Experience
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Making Something
Edmond Caldwell's Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant (Say It With Stones) is a much worthier and more accomplished book than 99% of what is published as "literary fiction" by most "name" publishers. It takes numerous risks, both formally and thematically, but it also manages to be entertaining without conceding to conventional notions... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Not Somewhere or Anywhere
The publication of Ottessa Moshfegh’s story collection, Homesick for Another World, does not so much allow us to measure the progress of this writer’s talent following on her first two published books, the novella McGlue and the novel Eileen, the latter of which in particular generated considerable enthusiasm among readers... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Formally Restless
In her 2015 New York Times review of Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo, Heidi Julavits complained that the stories in the book “do not cut downward or inward, instead they move laterally until the energy simply dissipates.” On the one hand, this seems to signal an impatience with the stories’ resistance to... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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On A.M. Homes
The books that brought A.M. Homes her initial notoriety (and her work did become rather notorious), the story collection The Safety of Objects (1990) and the novel The End of Alice (1996) are clearly designed to provoke, especially in their choice of subjects. The first story in The Safety of... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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Aimee Bender and the Surrealist Fable
There are really two writers at work in the fiction of Aimee Bender. First and most conspicuously we find the fabulist, who frequently invests her stories with a surface surrealism by evoking fables and fairy tales. The surreal qualities of her tales might be more pronounced and extreme (a human... Continue reading
Posted Aug 24, 2024 at Reviews of Adventurous Fiction
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