CHR contributor and literary-fiction blogger Clifford Garstang ("What's Right with MFA Programs" CHR 1; see his blog Perpetual Folly to find out what's worth reading, week by week) is visiting bookstores to promote his newly published collection of stories, In an Uncharted Country. Learn more here.

In an Uncharted Country is an impeccably written, sumptuously imagined, and completely enchanting book of stories, each with its own high ambitions, each successful both as prose and as story. Clifford Garstang is the real thing—a writer loaded with talent. And this book is a reminder of the delightful miracles a good story can perform in a reader's heart.

—Tim O'Brien, National Book Award-winning author of Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.

The University of Sheffield notes the anniversary of an important date in literary litigation:

2010 is the fiftieth anniversary of the trial of Penguin Books for publishing the unexpurgated text of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence had the book privately printed in Italy in 1928, and since then only a censored text had been legally published in the United Kingdom. The trial was a test case for the recently passed Obscene Publications Act, and focussed on the sympathetic portrayal of an adulterous relationship, explicit accounts of sexual acts, and most notoriously the use of the two 'four-letter words', which it was then against the law to publish. Numerous distinguished academics, including Richard Hoggart, whose papers are in the library at Sheffield, and other notable figures such as the Bishop of Woolwich, testified for the defence. The prosecuting counsel notoriously asked the jury if this was a book they would like their 'wives and servants' to read. As this suggests, the trial had as much to do with class as with sex. The failure of this prosecution is often cited as the inaugurating event of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

In 1910, Halley's comet reached its perihelion on 20 April; on 21 April, Mark Twain died, in fulfillment of his own prophecy the year before: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It's coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said no doubt, 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"

26 August marks the centenary of the death of William James, philosopher and inspiriter, who noted in The Varieties of Religious Experience (Library of America Paperback Classics) that "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."

CHR contributor Mark S. Richardson ("Meddling in Crime and Wordsworth" CHR 5) in his blog The Era of Casual Fridays notes that it isn't only in poems like "Putting in the Seed" that Frost exhibits his earthiness, but also in his offhand critical commentaries, citing a conversation between Frost and his biographer Lawrence Thomson: "He said he remembered saying to F.S. Flint in England, long ago, that there was something wrong with a writer who couldn’t get into his subject and screw it to a climax."

One hundred and fifty years ago this June, seven months after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, a debate on the book took place at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, with Samuel Wilberforce arguing against man's descent from more primitive forms. As Wikipedia tells the story,

Wilberforce's speech is generally only remembered today for his inquiry as to whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that Huxley considered himself descended from a monkey.

According to a much later retelling, when Huxley heard this he whispered to Brodie, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands." This quotation first appears more than thirty years later, and is almost certainly a later insertion to the story.

Take a tour of the museum.

The Pastorals of Ambrose 'Namby-Pamby' Philips were published in 1710, in the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany, setting off what once was regarded as a great literary furore, as explained in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in its entry for Philips:

Philips was a staunch Whig, and a friend of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. In Nos. 22, 23, 30 and 32 (1713) of The Guardian he was rashly praised as the only worthy successor to Edmund Spenser. The writer, probably Thomas Tickell, pointedly ignored Pope's pastorals. In The Spectator Addison applauded Philips for his simplicity, and for having written English eclogues unencumbered by the machinery of classical mythology. Pope's jealousy resulted in an anonymous contribution to the Guardian (No. 40), in which he drew an ironic comparison between his own and Philips's pastorals, censuring himself and praising Philips's worst passages. Philips is said to have threatened to hit Pope with a rod he kept hung up at Button's coffee house for the purpose.

At Pope's request, John Gay burlesqued Philips's pastorals in his Shepherd's Week, but the parody was admired for the very quality of simplicity which it was intended to ridicule. Samuel Johnson describes the relations between Pope and Philips as a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence. Pope lost no opportunity of mocking Philips, who figured in the Bathos and the Dunciad, as Macer in the Characters; and in the instructions to a porter how to find Edmund Curll's authors, Philips is a Pindaric writer in red stockings.

For readers wishing to judge Philips performance themselves, please click here.

Tom Whalen sends us this note on Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting . . .: The Unfinished Second Novel (Modern Library, $50, 1101 pages):

Considering it's been forty-three years since I heard Ralph Ellison read what turns out to be Chapter Thirteen of Part I, Book I of Three Days Before the Shooting . . ., edited by John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley, my memory wasn't too bad. One iron lawn-jockey, not two, who talks to the white Washington, DC reporter McIntyre in front of a racist Southern reporter's doorway, not Senator Sunraider's house. But in assessing what I heard that evening at the University of Arkansas as brilliant I wasn’t mistaken. For close to twenty pages McIntyre is as stuck in the lawn jockey’s discourse as Brer Rabbit is in the Tarbaby.

Will the US treat Three Days Before the Shooting . . . with the awe and respect it deserves? I have my doubts as to whether today's literary culture will be willing or able to plumb Ellison's irony or notice that this is the most important posthumous publication in the US in decades.

Random House would have done better by their property had they never published Juneteenth in 1999 and simply brought out what Callahan and Bradley have here as Part I, the typed manuscript, and saved the word-processed, expanded and revised material (Part II) for a separate book, after the hoopla over Part I had run its marketing course. Or waited and published this complete version instead of the Juneteenth “preview” Callahan concocted primarily from Part I, Book II, because without the chapters narrated by McIntyre in Part I, Book I, the novel loses a good bit of its radical bite and allows Rev. Hickman’s gravitas to weigh the book down. In the McIntyre material, which includes the famous “Cadillac Flambé” chapter, Sunraider comes off as one of the greatest trickster figures in American literature.

The expansion of the Hickman section Ellison did on the computer later and late in his life (Part II) shows how far away he was from his original inspiration and how he lost over the years the book’s sense of immediacy, as indicated by comparing the early opening sentence to the later one:

Three days before the shooting, a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator. (early) Two days before the bewildering incident a chartered planeload of those who at that time were politely identified as southern “Negroes” swooped down upon Washington's National Airport and disembarked in a confusion of paper bags, suitcases, and picnic baskets. (late)

There are many moments in Part II of interest (the “Windcave” sequence, for example), but in general it’s sad to watch over the course of 400 + pages (~503 – 970) Ellison fumbling and deadening his volatile work and losing his way in its ever expanding labyrinth.

The selection of Ellison’s notes in Part III (which also includes the eight excerpts from the novel Ellison published during his lifetime) shows us one reason why he couldn’t finish the novel: simplistically put, he set his bar too high. He would have done everyone a favor had he tied up a few threads or even left them dangling and let the novel appear in an “imperfect” state.

Or perhaps on his own private lower frequencies, he sensed what Salinger seemed to have known, that to continue publishing is to be damned.

A celebration of the work of Richard Poirier is planned for Sunday, September 27, at Kirkpatrick Chapel, on the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, NJ.

We note with sadness the death of Richard Poirier on August 15, 2009, at the age of 83. Though not known to be a reader of CHR, Poirier was a teacher, mentor, and friend to many of its contributors. He taught at Williams and Harvard before coming to Rutgers University in 1962 where he built one of the most respected department of English Studies in the country. Here are some web resources associated with his works.

• He conducted one of the outstanding interviews of the Paris Review series, with Robert Frost, in 1960.
• He contributed a prickly review of Frank Kermode's Puzzles and Epiphanies to the first issue of the New York Review of Books. Poirier and Kermode became friendly, and Kermode was invited to be an early contributor to Poirier's journal Raritan (see below). Other pieces in the New York Review by Poirier or about his works are listed here.
• In 1960 he published The Comic Sense of Henry James, where among other things he reads the opening paragraphs of Portrait of a Lady with unparalleled sensitivity.
• In 1966 he published A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature, which first testified to his dedication to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• In The Performing Self (1970) he brought uncompromising intellectual power to the criticism of popular culture of the nineteen sixties. As he noted later, it was in this book that he created for his own use the concept of deconstruction to explain the procedures of some of the writers he admired.
• He published a study of Norman Mailer in the Modern Masters series, in 1972: "No other American writer of this period has tried so resolutely and so successfully to account for the eclecticisms of contemporary life when it comes to ideas of form, of language, of culture, of political and social structure, and of self."
• His book Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, published in 1977, showed to full advantage his faultless ear for hearing tones of voice in writing. Poirier begins in this book his tracing the evolutions of pragmatism in the literary history of America.
• In this video clip from the PBS series Voices and Visions, Poirier can be seen and heard (at the 1:20 mark and again at 3:20) commenting on Frost's exploration of sentence-sounds.
• He was a founder of the Library of America, and later, chairman emeritus, and he edited, with Mark Richardson, the volume of writings by Robert Frost.
• In the early 1980s, he created the journal Raritan, where he published challenging work by established academics and intellectuals, including Stanley Cavell, Geoffrey Hartman, Thomas R. Edwards (who taught at Rutgers with him), as well as early work by Louis Menand, Adam Phillips, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Camille Paglia.
• Always looking for opportunities to promote Emerson among his countrymen, Poirier reviewed Emerson in His Journals, a selection prepared by Joel Porte, in the New York Times for 20 June 1982.
• His next book, The Renewal of Literature, continued his tracings of Emerson's influence in works by William James, Frost, and Wallace Stevens, as well as those of contemporary figures like Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, and others.
• In 1992, he published Poetry & Pragmatism, further exploring the Emersonian legacy in works by, among others, Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson.
• In later years, he published in the London Review of Books fascinating review-essays on various American writers, including Walt Whitman, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Saul Bellow
• Notices of his death, with resumes of his career, have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NJ.com.

We intend to keep this list available, updating it as we can. If you notice errors or omissions, please notify us.

Henry David Thoreau was born on 12 July 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. He possessed uncanny skills of observation, as Emerson remarked in his eulogy of Thoreau. Six days after Thoreau's thirty-third birthday, 18 July 1850, the ship carrying Margaret Fuller, her husband and child was wrecked in a storm off the south shore of Long Island. Emerson asked Thoreau to visit the site and gather any remains he could find. Emerson hoped Thoreau might salvage the manuscript of the history of the Roman revolution of 1848 that Fuller had been working on. No manuscript was recovered, but the effort stimulated Thoreau's imagination. He alludes to the experience of coming upon skeletal remains on a beach, not specified as Fuller's, in chapter 6 of his book Cape Cod:

Once also it was my business to go in search of the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks, which had just been cast up, a week after a wreck . . . .There was nothing at all remarkable about them [the human remains he found on shore], and they were singularly inoffensive both to the senses and the imagination. But as I stood there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it.

In his journals, Thoreau reflected on the triviality of the physical signs of life, as he describes a button he pulled off the coat of Fuller's husband, the Marquis of Ossoli:

Held up, it intercepts the light and casts a shadow,--an actual button so-called,--and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me than my faintest dreams. . . . Our thoughts are the epochs of our life: all else is as but a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.

We commemorate the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 25 August 1899. He might have spent time in his young manhood gambling and visiting brothels, but his biographer doubts this. His housemaid, Epifanía Uveda de Robledo, nicknamed Fanny, speaks well of him in the book she wrote, describing a man who was "ethical, austere, generous, of simple customs and surprised by his own fame." Borges became well-known in North America after the publication of Labyrinths in 1962; he visited Harvard and gave lectures on poetry. Clive James says he should have done more to protest the dirty war in Argentina in the 1970s and mocks his defensive claim (admittedly weak) that he didn't read newspapers, but Fanny corroborates this--"he threw them off the balcony" because he didn't like their smell.

July 18 marks the anniversary of Jane Austen's death, in 1817. It is presumed she suffered from Addison's disease. Three days before her death, she wrote some light verse, explaining why it rained so often on the day of the horse-racing at Winchester (the city called Venta by the Romans). Here are the first two stanzas:

When Winchester races first took their beginning
It is said the good people forgot their old Saint
Not applying at all for the leave of St. Swithin
And that William of Wykham's approval was faint.
The races however were fix'd and determined
The company met & the weather was charming
The Lords & the Ladies were sattin'd & ermin'd
And nobody saw any future alarming.

Read more here.

Cambridge University Press has been publishing a new edition of Austen's complete works, culminating recently in the release of Austen's "later manuscripts." In the TLS of 24 April 2009, Jocelyn Harris made unflattering remarks on various editorial decisions. Todd and Bree responded, and Harris has capped their response, ending with this invidious comparison:

When I think of the Edinburgh Scott, with its clear editorial principles, consistent editorial practice, justifications of copy-texts, detailed textual history, and scrupulous recognition of previous editions, I can only repeat that Jane Austen's Later Manuscripts is an opportunity missed.

David Thomson reviews an academic work on the pop diva avant le lettre.

And a few hours later there I was in a bookstore, just as distracted, looking for something else, when I saw Dusty again beneath her hive of hair on the cover of this book. An Oxford University Press book, no less! I opened it up, and this is what I read: Though much of the book concerns discourses, especially those revolving around Dusty's pastiche and identity disruption, its discussions carry a significant caveat concerning the evacuation of meaning and 'waning of affect' that, according to Fredric Jameson, characterize postmodern cultural products.

Even OED Online enthusiasts concede that many things immediately evident in the printed book are obscured or not apparent on the screen: the length of an entry, which may stretch over several columns and pages; the relationship between one entry and its neighbors; the variation in page count among the in the first edition, Chas a massive single volume all to itself, the same size as the one devoted to all ofV, W, X, Y, and Z.

Leonard Michaels reflects on his madrelingua.

Shakespeare's short sentences–like "Let it come down," "Ripeness is all," "Can Fulvia die?"–seem to me amazing. I couldn't write one of those. This confession brings a joke instantly to mind. The synagogue's janitor is beating his breast and saying, "Oh, Lord, I am nothing." He is overheard by the rabbi who says, "Look who is nothing." Both men are ridiculed. A Jewish writer has to be careful. Between schmaltz and irony there is just an itty bitty step.

The discovery of what's believed to be the only portrait of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime - found in the Cobbe family collection - means the Martin Droeshout image so embedded in our collective consciousness has a rival.

The Definitive Image

Harvard's masters of the apocalypse

Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O'Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there's George W Bush, Hank Paul-son, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: "To educate leaders who make a difference in the world."

It just wasn't the difference the school had hoped for.

Posthumous publication of the theorist's journals draws disapproval.

Sad afternoon. Quick shopping. At the pastry shop (pointlessness) I buy an almond cake. Serving a customer, the little female employee says, "Voilà." That's the word which I would say when I brought Mom something when I looked after her. Once, near the end, she half-unconsciously echoed, "Voilà" (I'm here, an expression which we used mutually during a whole lifetime). This employee's remark brought tears to my eyes. I wept for a long time (after returning to the silent apartment).

Mary Midgley teaches some literary manners to Richard Dawkins . . .

"This is clearly not Darwin's vision. He would not have dogmatised so hastily about matters that he was convinced are totally mysterious to us. Nor, certainly, would he have made the mistake of mixing claims to scientific objectivity with melodramatic rhetoric based on personifying the gene – a mixture which gives Dawkins his own grand conclusion that the cosmos is both a random, meaningless jumble and also a callous, brutal fate-figure that manipulates us. Small wonder that his readers say 'If that is evolution I don't want it.'"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2008/oct/28/religion-darwin-dawkins-midgley

DailyLit lets you read entire books in short, customized installments sent to you by email or RSS.

Her collections of poetry include American Sublime (Graywolf Press, 2005), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Antebellum Dream Book (2001); Body of Life (1996); and The Venus Hottentot (1990).

"A farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain," the Examiner thundered.

History has been kinder to the poet, painter, printmaker and visionary than contemporary opinion. Now Tate Britain is to recreate that disastrous exhibition - exactly 200 years after it was staged in 1809 - and will bring together at least nine of the surviving 11 works from the 16 in the original show.

Blake's 1809 Exhibition

EAP turns 200 on January 19, 2009.

How are you celebrating?

The Poe Bicentennial

It looks like good old Karl is a new recessionista! He's moved to a smaller home in Paris and according to Spiegel Online, his new vacation home is "not giant ... very Emily Dickinson ... In fact it's almost Puritanical. For me it's a new form of modesty."

Karl Lagerfeld Looks to Emily Dickinson For Inspiration

Bloke named Crace gave some maps of London to the British Library.

Crace Map Collection

Rolling Stone reported on p-e Obama's impeccably eclectic iPod mix last spring. Here's an update from imeem. We like the Fugees too.|Rolling Stone reported on p-e Obama's impeccably eclectic iPod mix last spring. Here's an update from imeem. We like the Fugees too.

Post-Marxist philosopher and all-around cut-up Slavoj Zizek talks, briefly, with the San Francisco Chronicle:

"I don't think I have an inherent sense of humor. My sense of humor is pretty vulgar, basically. The main reason I like to use it is that the tradition with which I am identified, Jacques Lacan and so on, is usually considered pure jargon, so I am obsessed with clarity."

Jeffrey R. Young reports in the Chronicle that professors conducting online courses are handing out diplomas to non-students who participate in their online courses. And their colleges aren't happy.

"The unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with something tangible: a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley, who at the time directed the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and is well-known in the area of online learning."

From Sunlit Uplands, a defense of Spain in the New World:

"The Catholic conception of the fundamental unity of the human race, on the other hand, informed the deliberations of the great sixteenth-century Spanish theologians who insisted on universal principles that must govern the interaction of states. If we criticize Spanish excesses in the New World, therefore, it is only with the moral tools provided by the Catholic theologians of Spain itself that we are able to do so."

New paperback editions of Nabokov novels are being released to coincide with the publication of The Original of Laura, a work unfinished at the time of Nabokov's death in 1977. The book designer John Gall explains the idea governing the cover designs:

Nabokov was a passionate butterfly collector, a theme that has cropped up on some of his past covers. My idea was also a play on this concept. Each cover consists of a photograph of a specimen box, the kind used by collectors like Nabokov to display insects. Each box would be filled with paper, ephemera, and insect pins, selected to somehow evoke the book's content. And to make it more interesting for readers – and less daunting for me – I thought it would be fun to ask a group of talented designers to help create the boxes.

The Laura itself is made up of detachable facsimiles of the notecards Nabokov used to draft his fiction, along with transcriptions. The actual cards are being put up for auction, as Kate Taylor reports in the Wall Street Journal:

But if you're looking for something really special, skip the bookstore and head to Christie's, where on December 4 you can bid on the actual thing: the 138 index cards on which Nabokov composed (in pencil) the work his son would call "an embryonic masterpiece." Don't expect to get them cheap, though. As the auction catalogue notes, manuscripts by Nabokov come on the market very rarely. Accordingly, the estimate is $400,000 to $600,000.

The publication of a new edition of Frankenstein gives Jeremy Kessler an occasion to comment, in The New Atlantis on the monstrous nature of the prose style ("Almost two decades after William Wordsworth extolled the poetry of naturalistic speech, Percy changes his wife's 'peculiarly interesting' to 'almost as imposing & interesting as truth'") and to note the monstrous nature of the readers:

We humans, creatures ourselves, come to empathize with the monster's plight: we too feel that what constitutes us is not of us, that what we are came from outside of ourselves. Whether we are built from dust in God's own image, or are a momentary pause in the evolution of multicellular life, there looms the knowledge that foreign material is at the very center of our existence. We are not self-fashioned and do not have mastery of our beings.

December 30 marks the anniversary of the death of Alfred North Whitehead, philosopher, mathmatician, educator and administrator.

As a boy, Whitehead attended the Sherborne School, said to be one of the best British public schools of its era, and he went on to study and teach at Trinity College. One of his students was Bertrand Russell, whose intellectual talent Whitehead recognized early; the two collaborated on the Pricipia Mathematica, published in three volumes, 1910-13. But Whitehead was uncomfortable with the culture of British education. He left Cambridge for University College, London, and then, in 1924 for Harvard University. He saw a need to open up educational opportunities to people who traditionally had no access to them, as he noted in a brief autobiography:

This experience of the problems of London, extending for fourteen years, transformed my views as to the problem of higher education in a modern industrial civilization. It was then the fashion–not yet extinct–to take a narrow view of the function of Universities. There were the Oxford and Cambridge type, and the German type. Any other type was viewed with ignorant contempt. The seething mass of artisans seeking intellectual enlightenment, of young people from every social grade craving for adequate knowledge, the variety of problems thus introduced–all this was a new factor in civilization. But the learned world is immersed in the past.

He lectured and wrote on religion and science, having developed a skeptical view of what he considered an insufficiently reflective materialism in science. He saw this constraint on science as ultimately unscientific:

"There persists," says Whitehead, "[a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived." [quoted by A.D. Irvine in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

He took issue with Einstein's presentation of relativity, and developed an explanation of the red-shift without reference to curves in space-time.

As he noted elsewhere:

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

He is sometimes said to be the last of the Cambridge Platonists. He died in Cambridge, MA, at the age of 86, as reported in the New York Times.

The second volume of T.S. Eliot's letters has been published, provoking less excitement than might have been expected, considering how closely held they have been. The first volume, covering the early years of his unfortunate first marriage and of the composition of "Prufrock" and The Waste-Land, was understandably welcomed by his readers. "What could the second volume offer that would be of comparable interest?" asks Stefan Collini, in the Guardian:

"Not a lot" is the short and only partly misleading answer. After all this fanfare, these letters will, I fear, be a disappointment to many readers. Though they document the tribulations of his and Vivienne's illnesses and unhappiness in heart-bludgeoning detail, they contain no great revelations, nor are most of them captivating pieces of writing in the way in which, say, the recently published selection of early Beckett letters is. Eliot scholars, not a small tribe, will doubtless mine them for illustrative or corroborative detail, but in truth they throw little light on the poetry, not least because he was not writing any (except for sections of "The Hollow Men" and the verse-drama Sweeney Agonistes, written towards the end of this period). Nor did he write any of his major critical essays during these years, and the letters say very little about his own critical, as opposed to editorial, practice. However, if what you want is a practical handbook on how to edit, single-handedly, a high-end cultural and literary periodical, this is an essential guide. Overwhelmingly, the letters from this period were written by Eliot in his capacity as editor of the Criterion and, if this is something that interests you (I must warn you that it interests me a lot), then this volume is rich in fascinating detail.