In the great tradition, stretching back at least to Leaves of Grass, of landmark books that just happen to be self-published, Suicide by Language has arrived.  David Markson titled one of his brilliant novels This Is Not A Novel.  On the very first page of that work, Markson writes, “Writer is weary unto death,” and “Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.”  Or consider that Homer created two epics, and Louis Zukovsky, some three millennia later, wrote one (at least according to the nomenclature of many commentators).  As radically different as Homer’s poems and A certainly are, what they share is that flowing radiance of language characterizing any literary masterpiece.  “Novel”: from its inception, an experimental genre, one that despite Sterne and a handful of others ironically hardened into a form with arbitrary requirements.  But halleluiah!  Markson and now St. Thomasino have blasted that random definition to smithereens.  

—Joel Chace

Coming. . . .