Friday, February 22, 2008

Extraordinary strangeness ...

... The short stories of V.S. Pritchett. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

1 comment:

  1. I think he's overstating Pritchett's disappearance a bit: even here in the United States, the Modern Library has in print an Essential Stories, an anthology of stories and criticism, The Pritchett Century, available, and the novel Mr Beluncle.

    That's not to say I wouldn't be glad to see Pritchett getting more attention. His stories are full of wonderful characterizations and his criticism is both perceptive and memorably phrased. I particularly love his dual description of Twain and Poe as the font of all twentieth-century American literature:

    "Everything really American, really non-English, comes out of that pair of spiritual derelicts, those two scarecrow figures with their half-lynched minds."

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