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Spiel of Fortune
A review by Robert P. Baird
It's easy to forget that American poetry was not always as friendly to the middle class as it is today. In the first half of the last century, a generation of poets who grew up reading Flaubert accepted Epater le bourgeois as the Second Commandment of their art, just after Pound's "Make it new." The postwar economic boom changed everything, of course. Flaubert’s motto continued to animate some, but poets like Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, and James McMichael proved that the life of the middle class could truly be a subject (and not merely a target) of real art. Campbell McGrath's Seven Notebooks offers dispatches from a year in the life of its newly middle-aged author, and like his previous six books, it stands squarely in this latter camp. Unlike those books, however, Seven Notebooks includes dated, diarylike prose passages that provide loose narrative stitching between poems. The January-to-December arrangement structures the work, but the absence of an actual plot means it reads ...
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Previously Reviewed by Bookforum
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The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
 More than four decades have passed since readers made the acquaintance of a figure who has assumed an almost mythological role in the stories that are sometimes told about the way we live now. This was the bricoleur, introduced into the cultural conversation by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the opening...
Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel by Edmund White
 "Write what you know" has been an axiom of fiction writing since the '20s, when Sherwood Anderson urged it on the young Faulkner; Edmund White took it to heart in his third novel, still his best-known work, A Boy's Own Story (1982). White's coming-of-age tale led to a series of autobiographical...
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Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of more than 850 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. To learn about how to join, click here.
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