Outside Stories

by Eliot Weinberger

Unpredictable and uncanonical, Eliot Weinberger’s essays are the “outside stories" of cultural migrations. The fifteen pieces collected here range from the history of the Salman Rushdie affair to the dream of Atlantis, from the turf wars among ethnographic filmmakers to the unlikely romance between poetry and espionage, from the pilgrims in Plymouth to the students in Tiananmen Square. Above all, Weinberger's concern is poetry––whether written in medieval Baghdad or by Mexicans in Japan––and the perennially underground yet global network through which it travels. With his modernist sensibility and internationalist perspective, Weinberger's inventive prose transports old myths and texts to the strange realities of contemporary life.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

177 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1992

About the author

Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages.
Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. His many translations of the work of Paz include the Collected Poems 1957-1987, In Light of India, and Sunstone. Among Weinberger's other translations are Vicente Huidobro's Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges' Seven Nights. His edition of Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weinberger's essays plot coordinates along the scintillating line that runs like narrow fire through the encyclopedic writings of Samuel Johnson, Diderot, and, more recently, J. L. Borges: that line of the synthesizing, associative intelligence that feeds on a diet of twelve-armed and ten-eyed reading. An enormous facility not only for collating but for a kind of omnivorous noticing marks the genius of this species of literature, as when Guy Davenport, in his "Concord Sonata," pays out a rope of apparently effortless literary detective work making Mencius and Thoreau meet as they never have before. In the grand tradition of high modernism - which prizes the virtues of juxtaposition over those of transition - Weinberger lays out, almost fractally, a chain of essays that seem to contain both reduced models of themselves and of their neighbors within themselves. Which may sound a tad strange. But the effect is consistently compelling, a silent fireworks of ascending and descending clouds of refracting meaning - a kind of seamless extension in outward form of what each piece vitally depends upon, which is the real and mappable geography of the imagination, the gossamer tracery of every kind of cultural transmission: Occidental artists finding the spring of modernity in the East, Oriental artists finding theirs in the West; every people of every time and place mythologizing Descents Into Hell alongside Metamorphoses; the translation of ideas, people, and poetry by sky, ship, and sound.

[Charlie Kruse · Rating 5 out of 5]

he's the goat! what can I say! what Eliot Weinberger does is write poetic essays, essays that stretch the limit of what the essay can do. And isn't that the very being of the essay form? Since Montaigne it's been an essai, or an attempt to say something in a new way.

Weinberger never fails to stake his intellectual claims deeply and articulately, whether arguing about the poetic relationship between the East and West, or the intellectual claims of Atlantis. Please seek him out this shit rules.

[Alvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed bag of random essays ranging in quality from Meh... to Absolutely Fascinating! I skipped a couple, actually, but the piece about Atlantis alone is worth the price of the book.

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am surprised how few "goodreads" reviews appear. This collection of highly creative essays and imaginative productions is without parallel in its inquiry into a broad range of ideas and mostly literary subjects. From the opening essay,The River, a phenomenal study of the connections between modern poetry and Asian traditions, and later, the uncovering of the relations between Mexico and Japan in literature, many stunning insights beautifully set out. The unappreciated and detailed recounting of the events and positions surrounding Salman Rushdie's publication of Satanic Verses is terrifyingly relevant today with the recent successful attack years later showing that this hatred only boils under the surface and then has its day. And the Rushdie case really repeats itself in other bombs, attacks and fundamentalist permissions unleashed by American politicians. Weinberger's interests range across a wide field of human activity and his point of view is unique. The last entry - Dreams from the Holothurians - an astonishing collection of notes and queries from centuries of hints about the lost island of Atlantis.

[Dow · Rating 5 out of 5]

The king. Eliot Weinberger rocks.