Thomas McGonigle

Latest by Thomas McGonigle in Chronicles

• Reviews

  August 1989

  Novel Ideas

  "Nigger" is the word upon which Bill Kauffman balances and dances his first novel, Every Man a King. It is, to say the very least, a difficult word. It is a word denied to white lips in polite society, and is now heard only coming with any frequency from trash-mouthed blacks.

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• Reviews

  June 1989

  An Audience of One

  Any literary effort by David Slavitt is a complicated business for a reviewer. The complexity arises not immediately from the work itself, but from the prolific nature of Slavitt.

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• Reviews

  May 1989

  One Hell For Another

  Karlo Štajner spent seven thousand days in Siberia and learned nothing. Of course the reader is moved by the awfulness of spending all that time in the Gulag, but still he is left only with the experience of a man who survived.

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• Reviews

  February 1989

  Piping Hot

  Concocted by four editors of something called Equator magazine (I am told it is a large glossy tabloid of odd people doing odd things), Hot Type's subtitle is: "Our Most Celebrated Writers Introduce the Next Word in Contemporary American Fiction."

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• Vital Signs

  January 1989

  The World of the Small Press

  If your local bookstore does not stock Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Guilty by Georges Bataille, Altazor by Vincente Huidobro, Compact by Maurice Roche, Space in Motion by Juan Goytisolo, I-57 by Paul Metcalf, Concierto Barroco by Alejo Carpentier, or Cold Tales by Virgilio Pinera, you're living in a culturally deprived area.

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• Reviews

  May 1988

  Better War Than Troubles

  The Irish have a word—as they are supposed to—for this sort of book: blather. The author could be described as one of those fellows who "does go on," to the point of being, eventually, barred from the pub for boring everyone to tears.

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