After a solid week of reading Richard Kostelanetz's long book about literary politicking [The End of Intelligent Writing], I got a bright idea of how to proceed with this review: I would start by describing "the New York literary mob," the familiar oracles of Commentary and The New York Review of Books. I would list (per Kostelanetz) their alleged abuses of literary power—log-rolling, back-scratching, puffing, touting, "white-collar mugging." Then I would consider w...

There are several remarkable features of Mr. Kostelanetz's discussion [in The End of Intelligent Writing], one of which is that he should find the situation he describes so terribly shocking. However vigorously we may deplore the fact, it is simply in the nature of literary groups in all times and places that they will protect and promote their own and, with one degree or another of malevolent calculation, will exclude or ignore those who are not their own. This may not be a desirable state of affair...

What a sour book [The End of Intelligent Writing] is—no allowance made for its "heroic" attack on entrenched elites, or its wide-eyed support of the new and the young, or its implacable earnestness will alter this central fact, and the reader will leave it frazzled and stale…. Granted that paranoia and apocalypse currently serve to authenticate artistic believeability, Kostelanetz' network of sinister, aging moguls … are hard to recognize in their desperate power ga...

"The End of Intelligent Writing" isn't about that, and isn't itself as intelligently written as it could and should have been. Many will say the title should have been "Richard Kostelenetz, His Enemies and Friends," and while they would be wrong, Kostelanetz has let himself in for it. He spends the first half of the book on his enemies—he takes Jason Epstein and The New York Review of Books to be the centers of power in literary-political America, and he work...

Richard Kostelanetz, a young critic who is acutely conscious of both his youth and his critical responsibilities, has edited a volume called Young American Writers…. As some of the young politicians do, he distrusts everyone who is over thirty, and therefore he has included only authors born after 1936. As it happens, several of his best writers were born in 1937, and it must grieve him to feel that within the next twelve months they will be lost to the cause. Indeed. Kostelanetz himself has only thr...

Although his title [The Old Poetries and the New] might imply an evolutionary understanding of the relationship between traditional and avant-garde poetries, Kostelanetz finds them to be engaged in a battle to the death. His dichotomous view of contemporary poetry (one often gets the feeling that a poet is either experimental or morally deficient) comes across very strong in this retrospective, and one suspects that Kostelanetz's polemical tone may in itself have significantly hindered the developmen...

Fiction is the last battleground between modernism and the academy, and is the best demonstration of the alliance and pattern of succession that modernism and post-modernism have established. The "innovative fictions" sampled in Breakthrough Fictioneers are seen by editor Richard Kostelanetz as moving…. In proving his point Kostelanetz draws on the work of ninety-eight authors, the inclusion of some of whom in an anthology of "fiction" may seem far-fetched, no matter how g...

["The End" Appendix and "The End" Essentials] is literally two books (in reversible format, front to back, and back to front) by the most perceptive watchdog of American publishing and writing, and one of the most articulate and persistent spokesmen for the experimental, the new and the young in contemporary American literature. It is sometimes irritable, often controversial and always articulate. "The End" Appendix is an addendum to Kostelanetz's The End of ...

Richard Kostelanetz introduces his new anthology of so-called innovative writing, "Breakthrough Fictioneers," with a long, peevish preface, the gist of which is (if I read it correctly) that fiction is pretty much anything he says it is, and the only valid innovation in it is going to follow, more or less, the lines laid down between these covers. This bold statement is accompanied by the usual pro forma assault on the blindness of the critics and editors of the world, and is footnoted by the ...

Richard Kostelanetz, who edited The New American Arts …, has also written or edited several other books on literature and the arts. In [The Theatre of Mixed Means] he defines "mixed means" as various noises and sights—people shuffling along the street, electronic beams, even the noise of many butterflies being released from a bag—which constitute a special kind of theater when these accompany some sort of dramatic happening, no matter where it may be presented, in a street...

Richard Kostelanetz really staggers the imagination—another publication has listed him as a sort of Renaissance figure in modern garb. After all the things Richard has accomplished as a critic, editor, and scholar, one discovers that he is also a great visual poet…. The first poem in [Visual Language] is a series of manifestoes done circularly and in different sizes so as to overlap—one sees "the poetry of life copies," "artistry bellies argument …," a...

A book is a possibility for action. Like a musical score, it does not exist until it is performed by a reader, and, of course, some texts are more difficult to perform than others. Mr. Kostelanetz's unique and fascinating Recyclings, apparently composed from earlier essays by aleatory techniques, are as difficult to review as they are to perform. In these pieces, the reader must come to terms not with plot, character, theme, or idea, but with words in themselves, devoid of connection, syntax, and gui...

Kostelanetz focuses on kinetic/semantic book elements in his minimal guy-meets-gal fiction [One Night Stood: A Minimal Fiction] printed in contrasting formats. In 310 words he parodies the humorously familiar "rise and fall" progress of the one-night-stand. Plot's quickly done, leaving the shift in format, mini-book to tabloid, to assume the burdens of action, reaction, and relationship. The book, with one to two words per page, cultivates page-turning suspense not present in the tabloi...

Kostelanetz remains a child of the 1960s—when he was in his twenties—a bad boy who refuses to grow up or be bought off, except, on occasion, by his own arrogance. His literary judgments [in Twenties in the Sixties] follow suit, swinging wildly from the unexpected shaft of insight to the petulant philistinism of blanket rejections. The "radical" typographical decision to print other essays and commentary alongside the main pieces is similarly both distracting and intriguing, but K...