Things that I like that almost nobody else is interested in

This post by Jordan Ellenberg (“Stoner represents a certain strain in the mid-century American novel that I really like, and which I don’t think exists in contemporary fiction. Anguish, verbal restraint, weirdness”) reminds me that what I really like is mid-to-late-twentieth-century literary criticism. I read a great book from the 50s, I think it was, by Anthony West (son of Rebecca West and H. G. Wells), who reviewed books for the New Yorker. It was great, and it made me wish that other collections of his reviews had been published (they hadn’t). I’d also love to read collections of Alfred Kazin‘s reviews (there are some collections, but he published many many others that have never been reprinted) and others of that vintage. I’m pretty sure these hypothetical books wouldn’t sell many copies, though. (I feel lucky, though, that at one point a publisher released a pretty fat collection of Anthony Burgess‘s book reviews.) It’s actually scary to think that many many more people want to buy something like Bayesian Data Analysis than would buy the collected book reviews of Anthony West.

I also think it’s kind of weird that Anthony took his mother’s pseudonym as his last name. But I don’t know the full story here. West published a memoir, which I should read sometime, then I’d probably know the answer to this particular question.

3 thoughts on “Things that I like that almost nobody else is interested in

  1. Particularly strange that those sorts of collections haven’t been published given that we’ve now got e-books.

    Of course, the publishing houses will whine “It costs nearly as much to produce an e-book as it does to produce a regular dead-tree book,” which simply means they’re doing it wrong. Crowdsource the scanning and editing. It can be done. The only barrier? Sheer lack of imagination.

  2. Pingback: The Feud « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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