English Classics Books

Gildas is probably most important today because of his connection to Arthurian legend. The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) contains the first mention of the Battle of Badon Hill, where traditionally Arthur met his death. But--Arthur is usually placed in the late 400s (Malory puts the Grail Quest in the year 454, others later). This means that when Gildas was writing, ca. 540, the late 400s were still within living memory. And Gildas makes no mention of Arthur. The great hero of the Ruin is Ambrosius Aurelianus. This is really all the proof anyone needs that Arthur never existed. To forget a great leader so soon would be like a modern person not knowing FDR or Churchill. King Arthur is an amalgam of several people, including Aurelius. Yet Gildas' work is the basis for many later legends, and is thus an essential text for anyone interested in Arthur.

This edition has the complete text of the Ruin, fragments of letters from Gildas, and his penitential. All of these are presented in English in the first half of the book, with the original Latin in the second half. The text is numbered by paragraph and line, so it's easy to cite from.

There are other editions of Gildas, but none are complete, and none that I know of contain the Latin. If you want to read Gildas, this is the edition to have.

The Ruin of Britain, written in 540 AD, is not what we would consider history yet is the only surviving narrative 'history' of the 5th century Britain. Gildas mentions only a few names (from his time) in the entire text however, he states his purpose for writing was not to write a history but rather to fiercely denunciate the rulers and churchmen of the day. Thankfully, historians known enough of the period from other references/sources to understand Gildas' comments.

Historical Background:
In 410 the Emperor, since the Roman Empire was on verge of collapse, instructed England to provide their own defense and government. Initially, the rulers were successful in fending off attacks from neighbors but fatefully, Vortigen invited in Saxons who in 441 rebel and capture Britain. An British counter rebellion begins and supposedly after 30 years (under Ambrosius and 'Arthur') they defeat the Saxons (English) at Baldon hill. However, this victory had destroyed most remnants of Roman institutions (Villas destroyed, farmland pillaged, etc). Soon after Gildas' death, the Saxons rebel again and establish control - that lasted until Harold's defeat in 1066.

Gildas' Purpose:
The victorious British, after defeating the Saxons, ruled well for a generation but in Gildas' time power had passed to war lords who exploited the church and overrode law. It is this anarchy that Gildas' denunciates. He supports his argument about the decrepitudes of society (especially the clergy) with Biblical quotes and offers 'patters for better priest.' What is perhaps the most important aspect of this source is its ramifications. Instead of reforming society, mass numbers opted out (i.e. founded monasteries) completely reinvigorating the monastic movement that was mainly defunct in Gildas' time.

Pros and Cons of Volume:
The introduction is brief and concise however, it could be supported by more examples to illustrate important conclusions. The most obvious being the monastic movement supposedly spawned by this text. The section on Gildas' Latin is very welcome as well as the inclusion of the actual Latin text. An index of biblical quotations is very helpful as well as a list of names (since Gildas' only names one individual this list clarifies Gildas' references to others). Gildas, although he does not refer to Authur, was used as a source for later Arthurian legend since many concluded that Ambrosius was Arthur. A fascinating source which is fun to read ('as the Romans went back home, there eagerly emerged from the coracles that had carried them across the sea-valleys the foul hordes of Scots and Picts, like dark throngs of worms who wriggle out of narrow fissures in the rock when the sun is high and the weather grows warm). Thankfully, the text is supported and explained by a good introduction.

Anthologies devoted to experimental poetry, avant-garde poetry, postmodern poetry, innovative poetry, and outside poetry have increased recognition of marginalized poets. This volume extends that work while taking a different approach, offering an anthology not of their poems, but of their poetics.

Editor Christopher Beach gathered these essays to demonstrate the range of thinking about poetry in the last two decades of the 20th century, from writers as diverse as Bob Perelman, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Maria Damon, Marjorie Perloff, Rae Armantrout, and Ron Silliman.

The book's four sections represent issues that relate to the practice of contemporary avant-garde poets: form, language, and the communicative potential of poetry; the extent to which poetry and poetics can engage in a project of political critique; and essays that offer models for a feminist or gender-inflected poetics.

While this collection appears to "round up the usual suspects" in the language school of US academic poetics and "artifice and indeterminacy" is hardly a slogan anyone would die for as a poet, this is actually a deftly wrought collection of innovative poetics dealing with questions of form and syntax and ranging into issues of gender, location, and ideology. It would be a very useful collection to use in a college course on poetics, or to ponder in your deformations of lyric selfhood and US utterance. Christopher Beach knows his materials well, and the choices he makes are quite deft and innovative in a quiet intelligent way. Perhaps a bit more global/local warping away from the US "mainstream" of innovation would have made the text more multicultural and plural. Still, this is a splendid gathering in its own terms and forms, befitting the U of Alabama series as "new poetics" terrain.

In Arts and Letters veteran novelist Edmund White shows again why he is one of the most inventive English language writers. It's a salmagundi of commissioned pieces and articles that originally appeared in a variety of slick and gay magazines. Taken them all together, and you get a lot of insight into White's own irresistible personality, even more so than in some of his celebrated autobiographical novels and memoirs. Plus, it's like being at the same party with some of the most intriguing personalities in the world today, as well as some dead immortals. White's style when he profiles these luminaries is never fawning--well maybe once or twice, but he does it so well you forgive him anything. He's fearless, and asks the people in question exactly the kind of questions you think you'd ask yourself, if you were there on the scene and you had balls of brass. Cleis Press is to be commended for bringing out this jumbo volume. I only wish there were more.

There's just enough of a selection of White's writing about art to make you wish he'd jump in and write a whole book about the art and artists he admires. It's hard to find anything new to say about (for example) Jasper Johns or Robert Mapplethorpe, but after reading White's articles on both you will be viewing their work with new eyes. And he provides wonderful introductions to artists whose profiles may not be quite as high as these guys--Rebecca Horn, perhaps, or Steve Wolfe.

One after another of these articles are stunners--there's a fine piece on the half-forgotten French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, which takes you back to the day in which he was regarded as a wunderkind of depthless talent, and then shows today why he is still a writer worth studying.

White is not always Mr. Goody Two Shoes either. In one case, the Ned Rorem profile, you watch in helpless delight as Rorem gets skewered on the high kebab spears of White's erudition and wit. I also thought that printing a brief review of James Baldwin's "Just Above My Head" and labeling it "James Baldwin" leads the reader to think JB will be getting the full-blown profile treatment and instead it rebounds and just akes the review seem skimpy. And in some cases the reader will disagree, perhaps violently, with White's assessment of this or that subject, and you will still feel he has won the right to deliver it. I don't believe for an instant that James Merrill is the equivalent of Cavalcanti crossed with Noel Coward, but it's amusing to hear someone say so.

By and large these essays are compelling, entertaining, and wise. It's a book that deserves all the praise it will doubtless receive.

Who would have thought in the 1980s that the author of "States of Desire" would become this eminent man of letters? In this book, Edmund White shows us that he is not only a masterful writer, but also can exhibit great empathy for the subjects of his writing. I admit that I envy his polymath's command of every topic (and his ability to use words like "polymath" so casually). Perfect book if you're looking for a thoughtful, reflective read.

I discovered Chesterton about fifteen years ago and I have been continuing to discover him ever since. One can never get enough of this great man. Claimed by both liberals and conservatives, he defies modern categories just as he defies modern thought.
Along with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. C. is a pillar of wonder and joy in an age of sarcasm and despair. A devout Christian, his generous thought is characterised by humility, humor and a sharp brilliance that both awakens and renews the mind.
This volume is a wonderful summary of Chesterton's vast library of work. I challenge anyone with a real interest in truth to read a selection from this book and not want to read more. One of the great things about Chesterton is that he wrote about everything and wrote well. His thinking is original and fresh, but also ancient and deep as the deepest streams of philosophy.
If you can read just one book by Chesterton (yes, I said it) read this one. This is the cheepest way to buy a Chesterton library. You will never be the same.
Enjoy!

There are two kinds of people, runs the old joke: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people, and those who don't. Belonging firmly to the first group, as regards the subject at hand, I hold that there are two kinds of people: those who have never read Chesterton, and those who want everyone else to. The problem for the first group is where to start. The problem for the second group is how to get them started. This book, I humbly suggest, meets both needs.

As usual, Regent has gone all out to produce a beautiful edition of a classic book, earning them high points on my list of best publishers. This one was originally a hardback from Eerdmans, published in 1985. There have been other Chesterton readers, so how does this one, edited by Robert Knille, the late avid fan and founder of the first eastern chapter of the Chesterton Society, hold up? Quite well on a few counts.

The problem for those in the second group compiling bits of Chestertonia for novices in the first group is to know how to group them. GKC wrote across the board; nearly everything piqued his interest, and nearly all he wrote displayed his sparkling wit, whimsy, and insight. Nearly all of it also contained some common sense idea at the heart, and nearly everyone from the first group who reads so much as a sentence, or even hears it quoted, at once dives headlong into the second group.

Chesterton collections really don't need any headings, and those supplied cannot help but be more sedate and boring than the lively bits below them. In that regard, this volume is no exception. There are three sections of poems, but nothing stops the reader from wildly reading them all together. The book starts off with selections from the autobiography, the last thing Chesterton wrote, not the first, published in 1936, a few months before his final farewell. This is one of the few collections to quote at all from the so- called Catholic books, which is to say, those published after 1922, or for that matter, to quote any Catholics. Most of the best- known non- fiction, including Orthodoxy, and the best known novels, including The Man Who Was Thursday and The Ball and the Cross, however, not to say the first Father Brown mysteries, were published long before that time.

One very helpful feature of the book is that each selection includes the source from which it is taken, which enables the interested reader to track down the books which catch his or her fancy. The selections range from a paragraph to a few pages, to an entire story, in the case of the Father Brown mysteries. Now that Ignatius has embarked on its publishing project, the Collected Chesterton, the lesser known titles are easier to obtain, and, for that reason, more widely read. But even those with well- thumbed GK books lining the library shelves will find this volume a valuable guide to finding (again) that zinger that lies buried in the stacks somewhere (who knows where), and which converted the reader, a former member of the first group, to a true believer.

One of William Shakespeare's comedy 'As You like it' has a lesson that a good will must be a praiseworthy thing and villainous intention is something always discouraged by the justice. It is something that we were able to learn from the fables and parents during the childhood. Duke Senior who living in banishment done by Duke Fredrick who is rascal in this comedy, and Duke Senior's daughter Rosalind disguied as a Ganymede searching for her father shows intriguing scene for the readers. True problem is that, Duke Fredrick's daughter Celia escaped with her cousin Rosalind because they are truly the confidant for each other. Therefore, Duke Fredrick displayed sense of resentment toward what his daughter and niece has done, and decide to go to wood to penalize his brother the Duke Senior. However, his attitude experiencing sudden transformation and repentant about his previous behaviors. Duke Fredrick's rapid psychological revolution should be awkward factor in this play. But we as a reader should interpret this as charater's assimilation to the nature. It means that the 'Nature' is place where has an innocent spirit and the castle, where deteriorated by human's negative will. I recommend this masterpiece, becuase there is a lesson implied in this comedy inculcate us that our human's mind has been deteriorated because of dwell in a city and surrounded by various artifact circumstances, it contradict to the 'Nature'
which has a universally respectable tranquility.

AS YOU LIKE IT presents itself as a comedy but more substantially a spiritual meditation of one's conversion to goodness. While the play retains conventionalities that resonate in his other comedies, Shakespeare had obviously nudged the play to a direction that is redolent of a religious overtone. The main plot concerns Rosalind, a woman who disguises as a man but pretends to be the woman she actually is so she can woo the man by teaching him to court her. A streak of melancholy runs through the play from the beginning when Orlando is bitter at his brother Oliver who has deprived him of a genteel education and retains him at home. The melodrama of the brothers presages a possible tragedy as Oliver proposes to burn the lodging where Orlando customarily lives and with Orlando in it.

Diversion away from the city and court somewhat mitigates the tension. Far away in the fairyland-like Forest of Arden (allusive to Eden) resides a banished duke whose crown and lands his brother Frederick has usurped. Duke Senior, in his landmark opening speech in Act 2, which introduces the allegorical Arden, duly expounds the pastoral philosophy. He articulates the monologue so well that the phrases become proverbial and the speech a sermon. Most of the actions then occur in Arden and in which almost all of the characters converge. Arden in a way represents a religious ideal and a converging ground for everyone to renew their identity and spirituality.

As Orlando flees from his villainous brother, Rosalind's venomous uncle Duke Frederick banishes her from the court to be with her father. Rosalind enters Arden disguised as a young man Ganymede and teaches Orlando about wooing. Whereas the woodlands of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM are genuinely magical and populated by fairies, the Forest of Arden is like a fictitious realm that represents an ideal in which social values, love, marriage, and identity are renewed and re-examined.

Shakespeare contrived to make a tale of redemption or some sort of a moral lesson out of AS YOU LIKE IT, preaching the ideal pastoral philosophy through the de-emphasizing of the plot. The story does not seem to matter as much as the underlying moral theme Shakespeare determined to convey. While Rosalind plays a leading part of the play and peremptorily takes charge of the play's situation (which facetiously involves entangled love among multiple parties), she extorts the necessary promises from all concerned and ties the right knots. Her preponderating overshadows Orlando despite the initial stress on his manliness and valor.

AS YOU LIKE IT is predominantly in prose: the opening scene that delineates Orlando's pent-up agony proceeds in verses so does the scene in which the usurping Duke dismisses Orlando and that in which he banishes Rosalind. The scenes involving the banished Duke, who delivers a tirade on pastoral philosophy in Arden, are all written in prose. It is not a coincidence, but rather a meticulous choice that the sober and solemn parts of the play are penned in prose.

Variation of theme that manifests in different plays again surface in AS YOU LIKE IT. Rosalind, whose disguise is already a Shakespearean convention, in teaching Orlando how to woo, speaks about the caprice of human heart, the failure of lovers' to keep in pace with emotions, and the conflict between impulse, feeling, and truth.

AS YOU LIKE IT could be easily one of the most canonical plays in the repertory owing to the fact that readers can lay claim to the text on their own behalf. The endless possibilities to interpret the play also ironically invite misleading account from focusing on only selected features. The famous line "sweet are the uses of adversity" cunningly sums up how in most comedies a near tragic crisis at which disaster or happiness may ensue could be overcome by such overriding force of goodwill.

Lives of the rich and famous recorded a time when there were no libel laws meant that even the dirt that wasnt fit to print could be disseminated, whether true or not. It still makes fascinating reading.

"Brief Lives" has always been a delight, but it was Oliver Lawson Dick's scholarly editing that revealed Aubrey's genius. And Lawson Dick's Introduction, "The Life and Times of John Aubrey", is a miracle of synthesis and compression: certainly one of the finest biographical essays ever written. This Nonpareil Books edition is sumptuous - a joy to read in these days cheap, quickly produced paperbacks.

Having been brought up on the notion that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the slighter and less-talented adjunct poet of her husband Robert, I was pleased to find I was wrong.

She's terrific.

This is a brilliant work, full of dazzling poetry and insights.

It's loaded with allusions and references (I read the Penguin edition; and the notes there run for many, many pages--and these barely skim the surface), but it is remarkably accessible and fun.

This is a work full of wisdom and unusual perspectives. Luminous and grand and down-to-earth all at once. Imagine Jane Eyre written by Shakespeare.

It's an education in Victorian (upper-middle-class) England, and also the Victorian English infatuation with Italy. It's also a biting and incisive feminist portrait, full of rebellion and self-discovery.

I strongly recommend it to anyone who likes poetry, or Victorian novels.

E.B.B. set out to outstrip Milton and does so in an amazingly original way. Aurora Leigh is a novel in blank verse that is actually longer than Paradise Lost! She combines the genre expectations for a woman writer--the novel--with an audacious bid for poetic immortality. The book tells a good story but it also works as a formidable reminder to her contemporary poets that the novel is taking over and poets must make sure that they are writing in the spirit of the age.

It is unfortunate that this fantastic narrative has been so neglected since Rexroth's death. I have considered this book to be one of the masterpieces of American literature ever since I first read it as a teenager, required reading in for every American Studies major at every liberal arts college and university in the USA. I hope that one day in the next decade or so, my own children will read it with as much enthusiasm as I did. In every respect, it is stylistically a quite original, completely American, work: it is neither a novel nor an autobiography but inhabits a middle ground between the two; it was composed by speaking into a tape recorder rather than written; it is a perfectly crafted ku:nstlerroman ("If this story has a plot or a theme it si the tale of aboy's effort to select and put in order the tools with which he would live his adulthood") and also a rambling yarn of the kind that seems to spin off subnarratives and stories within stories, and digressions in all directions (Rexroth isn't even born until Chapter 2, for example, and as originally published the narrative only reaches his 22 year); and finally, it is an amazing contrarian, counter-mythical depiction of a United States of America that Rexroth grew up in, as it was 100 years ago, a country that few people in our day and age realize ever existed (or as Rexroth in his forward puts it "to many people it may seem a most atypical childhood and youth. I do not think it is, or if it is, it is at least characteristic of one kind of American life."). From a geneological perspective (in the postmodern, French sense) this book is a snapshot of the pre-history of the ethical experience of life in the 20th/21st century. The postlude is absolutely brilliant and should be read, I think, before the book itself, to understand what it is you are about to read and how to put it in context.

The one drawback to this book is that it is edited posthumously by Linda Hamalian, a scholar who has demonstrated her own dissapproval for Rexroth as a person in her biography of Rexroth. I am uneasy reading a book that has been edited by someone who, in her own introduction, makes it clear that she is extremely skeptical of most of what Rexroth says, that the work is a specimen of the "ebb and flow of his imagination". For Hamalian, the issue - what makes this book relevant - is the fact-fiction question (which to me is precisely the most irrelevant question this book raises). For all I care, Rexroth could have made every word up, and, in a sense, it would still be all true in a sense, as true as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (just to cite another book about life in Chicago in the early years of the last century). It is sad that Rexroth's primary posthumous biographical champion is someone who is so unwilling to champion his text for what it is - a boundary-bending masterpiece - and is so focused on narrow questions of conforming to genre and sticking to verifiable fact.

The world may one day re-discover or discover the brilliance of Rexroth. It would be nice if it did. In the post-millenial world, Rexroth's life and works might seem to be from an alternate universe, not as high-tech as the one in the Matrix, but a lot more profound. Quitting school at the age of 11, Rexroth mastered every major European language as well as Japanese and Chinee, and Greek & Latin; he was a poet, painter, jazz club manager (where a cop bashed him in the face during a 'raid', he was an iconclast, socialist, environmentalist, and knew more about prosody than anyone alive. His life is spectacularly interesting, and he could make outlandish statements about art: Like 'anyone who knows anything about Italian prosody, knows Dante was a bad craftsman' or dismissing Leslie Fiedler in one sentence as a would-be WASP who is so ignorant of the American spirit, the best he can come up with is that Huckleberry Finn is gay (paraphrase). While MLA junkies analyze how many angels they can deconstruct in a nanosecond, Rexroth knew the value of literature and the value of life. The U. of Berkeley spent years begging him to teach there, and he finally gave in provided he could teach anything he wanted. He called universities smoke factories. This view has been substantiated today: not only metaphorically but literally.

Words cannot describe the book. It was so good. I could not put it down. You have really out done yourself this time Lolita. I am waiting for the next book.

Edward Hoagland certainly gets around. The 25 essays in this book cover territory from Wyoming to Yemen, by way of Okefenokee Swamp. He is an extraordinary observer of both people and places, and the results are uniformly interesting when he focuses on either. His occasional essays on literature are considerably less interesting, and his self-analysis less interesting still, but both are few and far between in this collection.

Hoagland excels in noticing the small details--how the shape of a cowboy hat reflects the wearer's home region, how a mud house erodes, what it's like to ride a transcontinental train at night. His essays are, as a result, full of unexpected pleasures--sentences and paragraphs that make you sit up and say "Wow!"

Recommended for all essay-reading enthusiasts. . . and as an education for anyone who's never thought of essays as literature.

Ever since I stumbled across Boyd's novel The Blue Afternoon, he has been among my favorite writers. The mark of this is that I haven't actually read all of his books, but tend to "save" them as yearly treats for myself. I was delighted to see that this collection of his nonfiction work was finally available in the U.S., some two years after its British publication. However, I'm doubtful that it will find much of an audience, as American readers are unlikely to rush out to buy a 500+ page collection of essays and reviews mostly written for a British audience. That's a shame, because the book not only confirms Boyd's mastery of prose, but reveals him to be a thoughtful essayist of the highest order and an incredibly insightful critic. It should be noted that this book is not comprehensive, by Boyd's own estimation it only collects roughly 30% of his nonfiction output from the last 25 years. This is divided into six areas, of which, different readers will have their own favorites: 85 pages on his own life, 130 on literature, about 90 on art (primarily modern painters), 35 on Africa, 70 on film and television, and another 85 on "people and places."

I generally don't care for memoir or biography, but the essays on his childhood in Africa and subsequent years at Scottish boarding were completely compelling. Also notable in the opening section are pieces on World War I and an 11-year legal battle to get the royalties due him from an underhanded French publisher. I dipped in and out of the literature section and quite enjoyed pretty much every piece I read. Especially notable are: a piece on Raymond Carver in which he discusses the problem of a writer becoming wedded to a style, his introduction to a new edition of Frederic Manning's Her Privates We, his introduction to a new edition of Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, in which he does not hesitate to point out the novel's flaws and failures, an essay on journal-keeping, a taxonomy of short stories, a scathing review of the posthumous Hemmingway "novel" True At First Light, and a piece about the general deficiency of war in fiction.

I barely touched the art section, since the majority of it concerned modern painters (Boyd is an amateur painter himself), of which I knew nothing, and without supporting material such as color reproductions, would have little to connect with. However, there is a short gem in there about his creation of a fictional painter named Nat Tate at the request of the editor of Modern Painters. Also quite good is an essay titled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Photograph," which is his introduction to a book called Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers. Africa is the next section, and I wish it had been bigger -- although to be fair, Africa figures a good deal in the first section of the book. About half the section is devoted to Boyd's friend, the Nigerian writer, publisher, and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the Nigerian military after a sham show trial in 1995. After reading this section, I immediately added his novel Sozaboy to my wishlist.

A great deal of the pieces in the "Film and Television" concern Boyd's own experiences as a screenwriter. Again, most of his work, while critically well-received, has never done much business in America. Some of it, I wasn't even aware of, and am grateful to be able to add The Trench and Sword of Honor to my Netflix queue (now if only someone would release Armadillo on DVD...). His best writing in this section concerns the process of filmaking, and he is especially cogent on the process of adaptation. The final section is a mish-mash of topics, ranging from particularly Londoncentric ones (minicabs, caffs, Newham), to profiles (Ian Fleming, Charlie Chaplin, The Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, the Duke & Duchess of Windsor), to places such as Montevideo. Most intriguing of all is an essay about the long-forgotten Galapagos Affair, which immediately had me seeking out further reading on the topic.

Overall, this is a fantastic collection with enough variety to meet all moods and for every reader to find something they can connect with. While it is helpful to be familiar with Boyd's fiction, since many of the essays touch upon aspects of its creation, it is not essential (although you're missing a treat if you haven't tried him). The only quibble I would have is that while each piece has the original publication date appended, I would have liked to know what publication each appeared in. It would have also been nice to have a complete bibliography of all his nonfiction as an appendix, so that those who wish to do so, could track down the 70% not represented here.

When this arrived from Amazon, it managed to displace everything else in my reading queue. It felt like Christmas in March: 500 pages of essays and reviews by William Boyd, one of my favorite authors, ever since I stumbled across "An Ice-Cream War", way back when.

As the book contains close to 100 different essays, listing them by name isn't really practical. But to give an idea, sorted into categories, the frequencies are roughly as follows (counts are approximate):

LIFE (autobiographical pieces, mainly about his African childhood, schooldays in Scotland, and time at Oxford; 10 essays)
LITERATURE (book reviews, for the most part, with essays on the short story, keeping a diary, war in fiction, and an introduction to Dickens and Evelyn Waugh; 30 essays)
ART (15 essays on artists as diverse as George Grosz, Pierre Bonnard, Edward Hopper, and Graham Sutherland)
AFRICA (7 pieces, including 3 on Nigerian writer Ken saro-Wiwa, a personal friend of Boyd)
FILM AND TELEVISION (16 pieces, covering Boyd's experience in adapting works for television and film, and as a screenwriter)
PEOPLE AND PLACES (17 pieces, including essays on Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, Ian Fleming, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, among other subjects)

Boyd is, I think, a more charitable critic than, say, Anthony Lane or Martin Amis, so there are fewer verbal pyrotechnics. But the book has considerable appeal - he writes fluidly, and with considerable insight on a huge variety of subjects. There are so many wonderful pieces in the collection that it's impossible to do it justice in a review, so I'll just mention three which I enjoyed particularly:

1. Boyd's essay on the short story, in which he provides a useful taxonomy of the form: the event-plot story (everything before Chekhov), the Chekhovian, the "modernist", the cryptic/ludic, the mini-novel, the biographical, and the poetic/mythic.

2. The essay "War in Fiction" in which he pinpoints the central flaw in almost all fictionalized treatment of war with remarkable astuteness:

"Any one man's experience of war or battle .... has to be an exclusively subjective, quirky and highly personal affair...... And yet one's reading of any account suggests that the experience is instead fundamentally a common one; a moderately varied but essentially repetitive parade of stock attitudes and conclusions. Furthermore, the basic judgement of nearly all war novels runs along these sort of lines: 'war is hell/shocking/depraved/inhuman but it provides intense and compensatory moments of comradeship/joy/vivacity/emotion or excitement.'
What appears most damaging is not so much the fatuity of the idea but that this formula represents an orthodoxy in the fictional treatment of war that - with few exceptions - is only paralleled in the pulpier forms of modern romance writing."

3. His thoughts on being translated. An excerpt:

"My Norwegian translator, for example, actually concluded one of his letters to me thus: 'Hey listen, man, if you're ever in Oslo and short of bread you can crash in my pad anytime'. aFter I stopped laughing I started frowning. ... I conjured up images of a superannuated hippie sitting cross-legged on a mattress in an Oslo squat blithely grabbing at the wrong end of every textual stick in my novel."

His bemusement that his three novels "A Good Man in Africa", "An Ice-Cream War", and "Stars and Bars" had titles translated respectively as "Gewoon een Beste Kerel", "Gewoon een Oorlogie", and "Sterren, Strepen en een Gewoon Englesman": 'What was this "Gewoon" business, for heaven's sake?'

Boyd is incredibly erudite, but never condescending, is a shrewd but generous critic, and has led a varied and interesting life. All of which combine to make this a terrific collection.

I highly recommend "Bamboo".