When the (then still) mysterious literary online magazine > kill author asked me in 2011 to write a guest introduction to their issue eleven named after Raymond Carver, I began my work by ordering a celebrated Carver biography praised byStephen King (!) and reading all the Carver stories I could get hold off. That wasn’t the smartest way to start…I do know that too much research too early in the day can silence the birdie. Interestingly, I had not thought of myself as a Carver fan but I became one in the process – even though the obsession with detail in Sklenicka‘s biography did eventuall put me off as much as the details of Thomas Mann’s digestion in his diaries full of suppressed anal eroticism bored me stiff when I tried to read them years ago (never mind the comparison, which concerns form not content). Carver is such an « American » writer. I was amazed that I liked him so much even though his background and his sujets were so different from my own. What I especially enjoyed was his sense for theabsurd, which I had never noticed before and which was going to become my point of entry for the editorial.  … 

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Posted at 10:31am and tagged with: 100 days 2012, kill author, carver, review, metafiction,.