“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things


Tuesday, November 15, 2011

On Life Kills and Moron-Proof Books

Below is a video of my (very brief!) launch speech for Miles Vertigan's excellent debut novel Life Kills. (Synopsis: Unpopular books, a Peter Sloterdijk-inspired reading of the novel, AusLit's love affair with boring realism, moron-proof books).


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