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In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane on V. R. Lang:
Lang’s titles can be equally startling. The naming of poems is a difficult matter, and a knack for it, like Lang’s, is a minor but enviable gift. Her titles include “Things I Have Learned in Canada,” “How to Tell a Diamond from a Burning Baby,” and “Who Is the Real Oscar Mole?,” a puzzle left deliciously unsolved by what follows. Then, there are the titles that set a scene with unblushing candor: “To Our Friend Who Married a Bore and Who Is No Longer One of Us by Choice.” We all know someone like that.
In a way, Lang is tapping into a well-used mode of address. You hear it in Robert Burns (“To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough”), or in Alexander Pope, whose most redolent short poem is titled “Epistle to Miss Blount, on Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation.” Lang is echoing Pope when she dedicates a poem “To the Guardian Angel of an Aesthete Going to the Middle West to College.” But she pushes further, topping some of her verses with subtitles—strange little snippets, not quite dedications and not quite epigraphs, that nudge a poem off course at the outset. “Lines for Mrs. C.,” for instance, comes with a gloss on Mrs. C.’s area of expertise: “about to annihilate, in a long succession of cat murders, two old stray cats with ether, in her washing machine, with the cover on.” Only then does the poem get under way: “O you cats, go home to God, / Kitties, where the saints have trod.” That final phrase is lifted from the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Oh, the blasphemous Miss Lang!
[Titles used to be exciting. Now they’re boring, as if the objects associated with unobtrusive minimalism in home decor sent parasites into everyone’s brains and made them think that the same principles should apply to titles. What happened to extremely lengthy subtitles? (Start arguing as soon as you can, I say.) And, while we’re here, what happened to frontispieces? —Steve]
Reviews:
In The Atlantic, David L. Ulin reviews Lydia Davis’ book about writing (Into the Weeds, September) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Sept. 13, 2025.]:
With Into the Weeds, Davis operates as just such a recommender, reporting from the slipstream of her reading life. As I read, I found myself making notes, ordering titles, and thinking about all the ways we come to books. Take The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923). “It was not,” Davis confides, “an obvious choice of a book to give to someone like me who was not particularly interested in woodworking and was not thinking of building a wagon.” At the same time, she reckons, the book represents an act of generosity—not only the gift giver’s but also the author’s. Sturt reveals much “that was simply new to me,” Davis writes, “as, for instance, that a blacksmith did not wish to admit sunlight into his shop because the bright light made it difficult to perceive and measure the precise intensity of his fire.”
The arcane quality of this information is what makes it resonate with Davis, because it reflects the pleasure of encountering the unexpected. Here, that involves not just the intricacies of blacksmithing and carpentry, but also the connection she feels with a friend. The further she reads, the more the bond strengthens; let’s call it a seductive intimacy. Not only that, but writing about it, sharing it with us, also transfers onto Davis the role of gift giver.
[“All the ways we come to books” is an illusion of variety in what are really three possibilities, which are: one, through reading; two, through someone else; and three, through randomly finding a book. And this is how the reading life works. It is private, it is conversational, and it is always bound to the physical fact of books (or e-readers, I suppose) and the places where books are borrowed, sold, or otherwise discovered. The variety comes in through the different emotional relationships we have to the circumstances which induced us to read any given book. I know exactly why I read some books—I read a review in this or that publication; someone recommended them to me, and I remember the conversation; I was at this or that bookstore, noticed it on the shelf, and decided I had to buy it and read it immediately. And then there are attachments to the physical books themselves. I rarely write in my books, but I know some people who, through taking notes each time they read a book, create a record of their thinking over time. The copies of books I read in high school or college have associations with my teachers and classmates. Most precious to me, though, are the books I have been given as gifts over the years, since the book creates a kind of conversation with the giver. I like to give people books for this reason too; it’s a way to talk to them even without talking to them. Also you get to inscribe the book, which is always fun. One of my friends has been getting copies of Jane Austen novels for the past couple birthdays and Christmases, and it’s a nice little challenge to connect the inscription with the book beyond the obvious “I like this and think you will too.” —Steve]
In our sister publication on the Thames, Julian Barnes reviews a book about Flaubert and his publisher (Gustave Flaubert et Michel Lévy, un couple explosif, by Yvan Leclerc and Jean-Yves Mollier, 2024):
Publishers such as Lévy established the templates for the business. (He himself told Sand that he wanted to create a need to read as powerful as the need to eat or to drink.) They printed editions for all pockets, from deluxe illustrated editions down to quarto-sized, two-column versions sold at ten centimes to “the less well-off”; they understood about publicity and marketing, and how to stir up the newspapers; they got their books not just into station bookstalls but also into the grands magasins that had sprung up on the grands boulevards. We may think the twentieth century discovered the multi-book contract, but Lévy pioneered it. In 1860, Flaubert’s friend Ernest Feydeau had had great success with his naughty novels Fanny (1858) and Daniel (1859), whereupon Lévy offered him a contract worth 25,000 francs for everything he was to produce over the next ten years. He then went to the Union life-assurance company and insured Feydeau’s life at a cost of 823 francs. Does any publisher do this nowadays? It would certainly add to a writer’s normal self-doubts.
[What if there were deluxe illustrated illustrations of the WRB? (Illustrate a worn-out man, eyes red, spine destroyed by hunching over his desk, surrounded by all kinds of books and notes and half-empty cans of seltzer, and underneath that caption it “the Managing Editor.” Alternatively, illustrate some intelligent- and attractive-looking people being great successes at parties and underneath that have some caption attributing their success to the WRB. Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.) —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
The fun of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, and review of some others
Notes on a cider tasting
A Poem by Philip Sidney and love poetry that lies about how love poetry is written
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
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