Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Literary news

is always annoyingly slow in August, but here's a good one if you want to read something absolutely scathing: Powell's excellent Review-a-Day site reprints Cristina Nehring on Erica Jong's memoirs, "Zip It: Erica Jong's Stunning Self-absorption". It's partly an effective piece because Nehring allows as how Fear of Flying's an excellent novel--I agree, and so does Anthony Burgess, who made it one of his best 99 novels in English since 1939.

(I skimmed through most of the memoir one day in the Harvard Bookstore this spring, for old times' sake, and can't say I markedly disagree with Nehring, though I would not enjoy writing such a devastating pan--the passages about the affair with Martha Stewart's husband are quite gripping in a surely somewhat unintended way. Here was my blog entry in March about the excerpt available online.)

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