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Salmagundi – Fall 2004/Winter 2005

Number 144-145

Fall 2004-Winter 2005

Big names and big reputations here, as always: Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Howard, Chase Twichell, Honor Moore, C.K. Williams. Take this issue along if you’re planning a long plane ride or a day of waiting somewhere, you won’t run out of reading material and you’ll be able to escape whatever drudgery surrounds you. The work here is dense, solid, and serious. Gordimer’s story, “Alleserlorenn,” is not to be missed. Big names and big reputations here, as always: Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Howard, Chase Twichell, Honor Moore, C.K. Williams. Take this issue along if you’re planning a long plane ride or a day of waiting somewhere, you won’t run out of reading material and you’ll be able to escape whatever drudgery surrounds you. The work here is dense, solid, and serious. Gordimer’s story, “Alleserlorenn,” is not to be missed. It is representative of her understated style and a fine study of the psychology of grief. There are twenty gorgeous (serious, even solemn) poems nothing superfluous, nothing “occasional,” nothing experimental. The “Memoirs and Letters” section is especially intriguing. Williams’ “Letter to a German Friend,” seems not merely timely, but necessary: “…we dwell on that demented time [the Holocaust] of death not because it allows us to imagine ourselves morally superior to anyone else—that would be something like a pornography of dread—but because we still live in a world in which there is always somewhere in effect a violent symbolic loathing of one sort of another…” Michael Blumenthal’s “Letter to a Psychoanalyst” is a curious blend of personal observation and academic discourse. The shrink whose narcissism has done Blumenthal a “disservice” may or not be a generic psychoanalyst, but anyone who has ever mis-spent a dime on therapy will appreciate his provocative critique of the psychoanalytic process. [Salmagundi, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $8. www.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/141/index.htm] – SR

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