READER'S BLOCK PA

In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an agingauthor who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of anovel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind'”literaryand cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not,scholarly curiosities'”the residue of a lifetime's reading which isapparently all he has to show for his decades on earth.Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinatingmaterials'”including innumerable details about the madness and calamityin many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, thestartling bigotry, the countless suicides'”David Markson has created anovel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoringup Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed toelectrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. WhereReader ultimately leads us is shattering.