Keith Miller
Guy & Dolls
Guy Ableman – the assonance with ‘Jacobson’ may strike the attentive reader – is a novelist in early middle age who reveres Henry Miller and, perhaps not surprisingly, is suffering an empathy deficit vis-à-vis his largely female readership (every novelist’s readership is largely female, of course, apart maybe from the odd science-fiction bod). One by one, his contacts in the publishing industry are falling prey to violent death, like Spinal Tap’s drummers. Publishing itself is looking pretty terminal, with the novel qua novel – qua is one of Guy’s favourite words – caught between the Scylla of digital technology and the Charybdis of a cretinised, sentiment-crazed readership.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'In their needling, selfish, dry-as-dust way, these three books are works of cumulative power and never less than consistent interest.'
@lieutenantkije weighs up the final novel in J M Coetzee's Jesus trilogy.
http://ow.ly/TuWo50xqrL0
'It remains a poem comprised of clay fragments, short and long, and though the desert delivers up occasional additional text, we are a long way from a whole poem.'
Michael Schmidt on the oldest surviving poem in the world.
http://ow.ly/7OLF50xqr91
'Apparently if you’re a teenager and you send a declaration of love to someone heart emoji, heart emoji, heart emoji and they come back smiley face, that’s the worst.'
Thomas Blaikie tries to get his head round the language of the internet.
http://ow.ly/TU6d50xroRc