The Death of the Death of the Novel
The Southern Review keeps knocking my socks off. I subscribed last year because my friend Allison Smythe had a poem in the Spring 2007 issue, which also features a jaw-droppingly good piece by Mark Jarman on metaphor. When it comes to journal subscriptions, I'm used to disappointment. I can't count how many I've let lapse. Maybe this would be different.
Last night I started flipping through the recently arrived Winter 2008 issue, wondering if it would live up to expectations. It did. Robert Clark Young's essay "The Death of the Death of the Author" is required reading. Young was at the University of Houston a few years before me, and mentions a few of the people I knew there. I wish I'd had a chance to meet him, because he's offered up the antidote to a festering affliction of mine.
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