Richard Canning

Let me begin by saying that I like literary commentary, and I appreciate what this book is trying to do. I purchased this book with the expectation that it would reveal novels hidden away from me during my education. The description on the back of the book supports this expectation. It lists some familiar names like Melville and Plato and then says that other authors "will be unfamiliar and waiting to be discovered." Moreover, the description never mentions those works that are already in the mainstream, like "The Epic of Gilgamesh" or Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." And it certainly doesn't mention that the only work of Melville's discussed is his masterpiece "Moby-Dick"! It also never mentions Yukio Mishima or James Baldwin, both of whom I wouldn't say are waiting to be discovered.

Surprisingly, the back cover doesn't mention Evelyn Waugh, whose novel ("Brideshead Revisited") is kind of a cult classic and isn't particularly discussed in mainstream education.

Many of these essays are simply redefining the sexual orientations of particular authors. Was Whitman gay? The jury's still out on that one.
But this book implies that writers can only ever "write what [they] know," and so assumes that if there are homoerotic themes in a work of literature then the author must be gay. So, many of these essays stretch facts a bit too much, and rely too heavily on literary criticism to make assumptions about the writer. I mean, if the "author" is separate from the "writer" (which is a pretty common philosophical idea nowadays in the art of literature), then every such assumption is just specious and a waste of our time as readers.

The book makes this stretch for Plato, Melville, and Whitman. It's just exhausting to read about some writer's personal interpretation of classics, especially when the anthology is supposed to be introducing "new arrivals."

That said, each of the essays in this anthology are well written. Many of them are particularly creative. The most memorable essay in this anthology, for me at least, has to be the one where the writer was cleaning out an old woman's bookshelves and happened to stumble upon the work in question tucked away behind rows of dusty books.

It is because of the consistent quality of the essays that I rate this book as high as I am, though I would ultimately say that it's disappointing.… (plus d'informations)

Canning has put together a powerful collection here--there's a good range of both styles and focus (with the theme in mind), and although one or two of the stories left me less than interested, the vast majority of the works here are beautifully written and tightly woven. Even within the theme, in fact, there's so much range of story subject and character that the collection never seems repetitive, which can too often be the case with collections like this. All told, this presented me with a few authors whose works I'm going to look up in the future, and was a striking and enjoyable read.

Certainly, I'd recommend it for interested short story readers.… (plus d'informations)

This is a very competent, interesting and informative introduction to E M Forster, without any frills. It gives a brief but solid introduction to the man, his writing life and the evolution of his books. Richard Canning takes a chronological approach to his subject, and writes engagingly about him. I received the impression that Forster was a decent and complicated person, who, while struggling with his own sexuality during times that did not accept anything other than the standard (at least outwardly), was also adamant that he wouldn't let his mother know he was homosexual. Given that she lived until she was ninety-five, he had to wait a long time before he could be completely frank in public. He did not publish another novel after his famous A Passage to India in 1924, and lived a long life, dying in 1970 at the age of ninety. I am forever grateful to Canning for quoting Forster thus: '...since even in India he had felt unable to write creatively, telling Reid how "very unhappy" it made him to "see beauty going by and hav[ing] nothing to catch it in"' (52). Writing to me will now always be something to catch beauty in!

Many thanks to Hesperus Press for providing this book, and for their excellent series in general.… (plus d'informations)