Word: books
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...decision to design the book in such an unusual fashion is questionable; the accordion-like pages are more difficult to handle than the leaves of a traditional book, and the hefty box that contains them is far more unwieldy than an average hardcover tome. An edition of “Nox” in which the poems, translations, letters, and photographs appeared as regular pages would be equally effective in recreating the poet’s attempt to understand her own grief...
...after all, Carson’s delicate efforts toward finding consolation that provide the driving force of her book. Towards the beginning of her journal, it seems that Carson tries to comfort herself through telling the story of her brother’s life: “My brother ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail. He wandered in Europe and India, seeking something, and sent us postcards or a Christmas gift, no return address. He was traveling on a false passport and living under other people’s names. This isn’t hard...
...There’s a really big aesthetic shift between act one and act two, and I wanted to delve into the classic fairy book style to a more stark and darker tone. That’s what I see in the second act when everything gets destroyed—there’s a darker aesthetic,” she says...
...that, in a nutshell, is the exactly sort of the statement—somewhat provocative and intentionally theatrical—that has made “Reality Hunger” into a topic of conversation since its publication. The book, a self-proclaimed “manifesto,” is as elusive of genre classification as it is resistant to a simple encapsulation. At once a meditation on the idea of truth in art, “Reality Hunger” also comes off as rallying cry for what Shields describes as “an organic...
...course, “Reality Hunger” itself is meant as an example of the sort of collage for which Shields so loudly clamors throughout the book: it has no narrative structure whatsoever, is told in a series of dubiously related vignettes—some like essays, others like haikus—and draws upon a wealth of examples from culture as highbrow as Proust and as lowbrow as reality television shows. “Nothing is going to happen in this book,” Shields writes...