Failure Issue

by John O'Brien (Editor), John O'Brien (Editor)

An issue devoted to failure should be no issue at all. Instead, guest editor Joshua Cohen has failed at failure and assembled an unparalleled group of contributors for this specially themed issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Original work by Helen DeWitt, Keith Gessen, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, and others, alongside a first-time-in-print selection from Gilbert Sorrentino’s correspondence, address questions such as: What makes a bad book bad? Why did I get a divorce? Is the Internet a consolation or catastrophe? Should I kill myself and how? And, have we failed literature or has literature failed us?

197 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2011

About the author

Librarian Note: There are many authors with the name John O'Brien. This profile contains various authors. See below for disambiguated authors.

John 2^ O'Brien : Author of Leaving Las Vegas
John 3^ O'Brien : Children's Book Author & Illustrator
John 4^ O'Brien : Pseudonym of Patrick Joseph Hartigan, Poet
John 5^ O'Brien : Pioneer of Person Centered Planning
John 6^ O'Brien : Co-Founder and Editor of Review of Contemporary Fiction
John 7^ O'Brien : GR Author, Horror, Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction
John 8^ O'Brien : GR Author, Environment
John 9^ O'Brien : John O'Brien OFM, GR Author, Religion, Christian
John 10^ O'Brien : Biography, author of At Home in the Heart of Appalachia
John 11^ O'Brien : Business, Investment
John 12^ O'Brien : Crime
John 13^ O'Brien
John 14^ O'Brien
John 15^ O'Brien: New Zealand children's book author

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This issue failed to live up to its billing and to the ontological potentialities of failure. Where would human beings be if they hadn't in the beginning first failed to speak and to fuck properly?

But nevertheless some gentle pieces of literary failure as promises of success. Try. Fail. Fail again. Fail better.


from the Introduction

How can a writer write, let alone write well, about Failure? Isn't the very existence of this issue remarkably insensitive to its theme?
Let this this introduction disappoint you then. I cannot fail to thank the contributors and my collaborators at Dalkey Archive Press.

Joshua Cohen,
Brooklyn, NY"

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

An issue devoted to failure: failure, largely, in writing among writers and writers who wrote about failure, themselves commercial failures, whose failure becomes either transcendent or famous for its failure.

Sam Frank’s ‘The Document’ takes the form of his father’s early short story, interspersing straight autobio with reflections on his time being thumbtacked by Saul Bellow in the late 60s. David Markson is the strange glue that holds the collection together: a man who found his form through a failure to plough his own narrative furrow, a form through lack of form, and ‘The Failure of Americans’ explores him in relation to Melville and Stein.

‘Itchy Homo’ and ‘The Five Percent Paradox’ are embittered explorations of publishing and the writer’s 100% guarantee of continual failure as life’s thorny backdrop. For light relief, there are selected messages between Gilbert Sorrentino and John O’Brien (Dalkey Archive editor), where the novelist snipes about his advances, his cover art, his general obscurity in the book market. It’s enough to make you detach the noose.

Includes excerpts from the divine Eileen Myles memoir Inferno and a not entirely promising draft of Michael Brodsky’s WiP Invidicum.