Patrick Maguire
Real-life Americans
Women
By Charles Bukowski
W.H Allen 291pp £6.95
The Rat on Fire
By George V Higgins
Secker & Warburg 183pp £5.95
The publisher’s come-on for Charles Bukowski’s Women cites Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet. Both apparently have acclaimed him as ‘the best poet in America’. Perhaps this says something about the efforts of every other poet in America, or indicates the perversity of existentialist taste, or maybe even it reflects the common understanding of American English of the Gallic savant and ex-voleur (a language of unfettered mendacity?). Or it could be that they were just drunk at the time?
It is indeed a wondrous thing that Chinaski, a performing poet if ever there was one, can get it up at all, given his inordinate fondness for the sauce. But get it up he (mostly) does. For Lydia, Lilly, April, Valerie, Dee Dee, Nicole, Mindy, Tammy, Mercedes, Debra, Cassie, Sara,
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
Stephen Smith - Art of Rebellion
Stephen Smith: Art of Rebellion - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
literaryreview.co.uk
‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
Henry Hitchings - The Play’s the Thing
Henry Hitchings: The Play’s the Thing - A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk