I’m still playing catch-up so I won’t go into detail about Danielle Dutton’s excellent reading yesterday from her new book Attempts at a Life. It was amusing to arrive at the Four-Faced Liar on West 4th St., site of the Tarpaulin Sky reading series, a few minutes before the scheduled start of the event and witness the consternation of several young men who looked like leftovers from the St. Patrick’s Day parade when the bartender informed them that if they stayed to drink, they’d have to be quiet and listen. “See, these people are writers and somebody published a book so there’s going to be somebody up here giving a reading. I mean, the stuff is good and everything, but we have to turn the music off and you’ll need to stop talking.” “I just wanna get plastered,” one muttered forlornly. The place was packed with those who came to listen. Danielle’s book, which includes a wonderfully wry, accelerated version of Jane Eyre that Danielle said represented her youthful assimilation of the text over many readings, is available from Tarpaulin Sky (www.tarpaulinsky.com).

My review essay on the work of Sarah Waters is out in the new Boston Review. I argue that Waters’s most recent novel, The Night Watch, set during World War II, represents a “bandaged moment” of her talent (to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson, whose image of the loosed spirit “dancing like a bomb” seems perfect for the exuberance of Waters’s earlier Victorian pastiches). To take a look, go to: http://bostonreview.net/BR32.2/clausen.html