Still on Call

by Richard G. Stern and Richard Stern

Book Overview

"Richard Stern is a literary treasure."
---Scott Turow

"Stern's new miscellany reveals a literary mind of the first order, thinking in elegant prose about dozens of interesting subjects."
---Philip Roth

"Stern is a great virtuoso. . . . [I]n an ailing literary culture, we should be grateful for a work like this and a career, too, spanning the American half-century."
---New York Times Book Review

"Stern's skill...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472050907
• ISBN13: 9780472050901
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Almost the invention of a new genre.

Richard Stern quotes John Barth saying to him, "Oh, you know a lot, and you're productive, but where's the virtuosity, where's the art?" The art consists of feigning that there's mainly miscellany and little order to Stern's "orderly miscellanies," which Hugh Kenner has called "almost the invention of a new genre." In their hybrid messiness, straddling fiction and non-, life and art, Stern's "orderly miscellanies" perfectly embody and dramatize Stern's perpetual agon (the life/art nexus). The miscellanies' titles invariably define, with precision and subtlety, the thematic investigations the books undertake: _One Person and Another_ is about idolatry; _What Is What Was_ is about memory; _The Position of the Body_ is about mortality. This new book, his sixth and "final" such collection, _Still on Call_, is an extraordinary meditation on the end-game. I recommend that people read it and the "orderly miscellanies" that led up to it.