Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Re: Quin
    Re: Quin
    Re: Quin
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Re: Quin

    By Robert Buckeye

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The influential, daring, and lacerating novels of Ann Quin were very much products of their time—but Quin herself had more than a little influence upon shaping the era in which she lived. Her works bracket the '60s and embrace their drive to experiment and break through to another form of consciousness, and so another means of telling stories, as J. G. Ballard, and B. S. Johnson were doing, and as, later—in many ways following directly in Quin's footsteps—Kathy Acker would as well. In reading Quin we are taught to question the very enterprise of fiction itself; to read Quin one must be prepared to lose one's way. Re: Quin is an unabashedly personal and partisan critical biography of one of the greatest and yet most neglected fiction writers of the so-called "experimental" wave of British novelists of the 1960s.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDalkey Archive Press
    Release dateSep 5, 2013
    ISBN9781564789891
    Re: Quin

    Related to Re

    Related ebooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Thomas Bernhard (1978)

      Dec 1, 2020

      WHEN, JUST over a month ago, Thomas Bernhard’s last play, Immanuel Kant, premiered in Stuttgart—a play in which the philosopher from Königsberg, accompanied by a servant, a parrot, and his wife, undertakes a long, long sea voyage to New York—most Ger

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Living Mandelstam

      May 1, 2020

      It is common for English-language accounts of Mandelstam’s life to begin with an account of his death. Consider the first sentence of a twosentence biography that appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2016 to preface a translation by Andrew Dav

      13 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      My Favorite Unpublished Books

      Sep 1, 2023

      My Favorite Unpublished Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Ceremony

      Sep 6, 2022

      It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. M

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Siege of Clarice Lispector

      Apr 30, 2019

      The Siege of Clarice Lispector
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Mournful Spring

      Mar 1, 2022

      in memory of Adam Zagajewski So many friends have you seen pass,maestro of the poetic eulogy. Now it’s my turn. Can you hear me?We don’t know. Why didn’t we spend more time together,talk more, call each other? I thought you’d live to be old,very ol

      1 min read

    • Article

      Apology

      Mar 1, 2022

      My father would take the washclothand wring it out with both of his hands,the water falling like rain from a heavenhe controlled. He would wash my back,and I would watch him teach metenderness—the way he would guta deer, holding the ribs like a dance

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Slow Bloom of ‘Suite for Barbara Loden’

      Apr 19, 2019

      This 2018 publication of the novel brings closure to a 50-year saga, coinciding with the height of the #MeToo movement, which has given women everywhere renewed strength through common vulnerabilities. The post The Slow Bloom of ‘Suite for Barbara Lo

      6 min read

    • Article

      Bhanu Kapil

      Mar 15, 2019

      Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village. A motorbike was coming from the opposite direction. The driver of the motorbi

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Lauren Oyler

      Dec 16, 2020

      As I was waiting in line to buy The Complete Gary Lutz it was discovered that some of the books for sale were partially printed upside down. They wouldn’t sell me one of the messed-up books, though I wanted one and said, “No, no, it’s fine, I want on

      5 min read

    • Article

      On The Shelf

      Apr 14, 2020

      Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark is not your average autobiography. The book mirrors the fragmented and sometimes confusing nature of the author’s life. Wark freely admits she has no answers to the many questions she poses or to the situations confro

      3 min read

    • Article

      David Berman, Slacker God

      Aug 8, 2019

      David Berman, Slacker God
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Re

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Re - Robert Buckeye

      SELECTED OTHER WORKS BY ROBERT BUCKEYE

      Covering Ground

      Pressure Drop

      Setting a Table

      The Munch Case

      Still Lives

      Re: Quin

      Robert Buckeye

      DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

      CHAMPAIGN / LONDON / DUBLIN

      For Peter Anastas

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      1. Introduction

      2. The Life

      3. Search

      4. Sex

      5. Silence

      6. Death

      Works Cited

      . . . how each of us manages to make more evident his own resistance. For that is the way a man comes to core. By way of, the discovery of, his own resistance.

      —Charles Olson

      INTRODUCTION

      "There was no beginning . . . We’d stopped living. The beginning did not, would not, exist prior to the end . . . Hallucinations within the hallucinations that was already speech. The body of a dead princess as a metaphor for literature."

      —Stewart Home

      IN THE FALL of 1964, I heard Malcolm X speak at Wayne State University in Detroit. Several months before Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney had been murdered. The murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy the year before had set off something, a premonition that was chilling, as if we had awakened to a world we did not believe, but no one, except perhaps Malcolm, anticipated what was to follow. Malcolm himself gunned down. Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, murdered by the Klu Klux Klan in Selma, Alabama. Martin Luther King shot. Robert Kennedy picked off. Riots in the cities, including Detroit three years later.

      Malcolm was electric. Had there been anyone as charismatic, as challenging? Anyone whose mind as sharp as a knife? I still do not think so. Democracy had been a lie, Malcolm said, matter-of-factly, as if, of course, we all knew that, equality a myth, freedom for those with nothing left to lose. If we did not do something.

      Malcolm paused, and the question hung in the air.

      Well.

      There was a storm coming.

      §

      What followed is by now an old story. For others, a story they don’t want to hear. One that does not go away. Assassinations and turmoil worldwide. Protests against racial, gender and class inequality. Outrage against the Vietnam War (Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, Michael Herr writes, we’ve all been there.) Rioting in Watts, Detroit, Newark, Chicago. Student protests in Warsaw, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, across America after Kent State. Bloody Sunday in Derry, the Prague Spring, Solidarity, Che Guevara shot in Bolivia, Israel’s Six-Day War, a military takeover in Greece, Rudi Dutschke shot in Berlin. Its quasars were, J. G. Ballard was to tell us in Love & Napalm:Export U.S.A., Malcolm X, beautiful as the trembling hands in tabes dorsalis; Claude Eatherly, migrant angel of the Pre-Third; Lee Harvey Oswald, rider of the scorpion.

      Things could not go on as they had before. The entire world was on the verge of radical transformation, Eliot Weinberger writes in Written Reaction, from the structure of society and state to the details of body ornament. The Stones and bellbottoms. Free love and free spirits. Equality as never before, possibility unthought of. Resistance and revolution. In the streets of Paris in May, 1968, French students took for their cry a Situationist International slogan, Under the Paving Stones, the Beach, to emphasize the need to discard the old ways of doing business to find a way to live that was free, fulfilling, just.

      Some writers felt that their writing had not only to reflect the times, but also, in some way, lead them. The business of literature could not be conducted as it had been before. These writers dismissed traditional methods and ignored mainstream venues for new ways in which to write and alternative sites in which to situate their writing—bars were not uncommon. Little mags far from New York, London or Paris proliferated. If it was poetry that brought the unsettled debts of history back into play, Greil Marcus writes in Lipstick Traces, the unsettled debts of history brought forth poetry. What they wrote, Weinberger adds, appeared, like oracles.

      Ann Quin’s four novels bracket the Sixties. If establishment Anglo novels continued to dominate critical attention, there were writers like Quin whose books escaped, challenged or ignored tradition. Novels by Amis, Bellow, Davies, Fowles, Graham Greene, Mary McCarthy, Murdoch, Naipaul, Philip Roth, and Updike were contested formally from one side by John Berger, Gass, Hawkes, Aidan Higgins, Paul Metcalf, Pynchon and Wurlitzer, among others, and culturally from the other side by novels that resisted the imperatives of a middle class, increasingly petit bourgeois, reading public, including Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), Trocchi’s

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1