Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Paradise & Elsewhere reviewed in Music & Literature


Since its inception a couple years back, the biannual Music & Literature has without question been one of our favourite literary journals. Featuring fascinating portfolios on such writers, artists, musicians as Clarice Lispector, Mary Ruefle, László Krasznahorkai, Max Neumann, Gerald Murnane, Hubert Selby Jr  and many others, the journal is, in the words of Scott Esposito, "absolutely first-rate. The kind of thing that’s unavailable anywhere else." The New Directions Blog also recently ran a great interview with  M&L's editors that gives a good sense of the journal's mandate and the scope of its project.


M&L also has an excellent online reviews section, curated by the indefatigable Jeffery Zuckerman. And today we were graced with our first ever coverage for a Biblioasis book within its pages, and in the form of an uber-smart, laudatory review of Kathy Page's Paradise & Elsewhere by McNally Jackson bookseller and former Melville House marketing director Dutin Kurtz, no less. 

Here's a small taste of this brilliantly executed review:

The Canadian author Kathy Page has been compared by critics to Angela Carter, and it’s easy to understand why ... as with Carter, Page enlists the tone of myth and fable to tell nuanced feminist stories, to undermine mythic structures by grounding them in the body. But whereas Carter is using fairy tales to talk about the cruelty and power of fairy tales, for Page the mythic idiom is a means, is incidental ... Whereas Carter rejects the comforts of myth, treats it as patriarchal structure to be opened wetly by the recursive blade of fairy tale, for Page the fantastic, the mythic, is a means to tell the story of connection and transcendence, of escape. In service of that story she ropes into these odd tales discussion of tourism, of loneliness, of possibility, of tea. Carter beats on iron that we might hear the din; Page, in this remarkable collection, would rather watch the sparks.

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