| Grendel by John Gardner, 154 pages Steve Gadd 05 September 1998 Very clever and memorable. | Grendel by John Gardner, 174 pages Steven Krise 16 July 2003 He smashes me against it, breaks open my forehead. Hard, yes! Observe the hardness, write it down in careful runes. Now sing of walls! Sing! I howl. Sing! "I'm singing!" Sing Words! Sing raving hymns! "You're crazy. Ow!" Sing! "I sing of walls," I howl. "Hooray for the hardness of walls!" Terrible, he whispers. Terrible. He laughs and lets out fire. "You're crazy," I say. "If you think I created that wall that cracked my head, you're a fucking lunatic." Sing walls, he hisses. I have no choice. |
The Wreckage of Agathon by John Gardner, 279 pages Steven Krise 01 February 2005 I think there might something more going on underneath the story of a political dissident coming to grips with his mortality and the consequent "coming of age" of his disciple, but I'm not sure what it might be. Be sure to have your OED handy - dianoetic, canescence, pulchritude, brume. |
The King's Indian by John Gardner, 354 pages Steven Krise 25 February 2005 Three collections of short stories arranged into 3 "books". Author injects himself into the final story 8 pages from the end, apparently, to confirm that the book is mostly filled with nonsense. |
Grendel by John Gardner, 152 pages Steven Krise 27 April 2007 "You're crazy," I say. "If you think I created that wall that cracked my head, you're a fucking lunatic." |
Grendel by John Gardner, 174 pages Steve Gadd 11 May 2007 He stretched his wings -- it was like a huge, irascible yawn -- then settled again. "Things come and go," he said. "That's the gist of it." |
The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner, 746 pages Steven Krise 28 May 2007 "I'm boring you," Hodge said. And he knew it was true, or ought to be -- Millie, at any rate, would be bored, and rightly, rightly. So would a reader if this were all a novel. |
The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, 224 pages Steven Krise 13 January 2008 Great fiction can make us laugh or cry, in much the way that life can, and it gives us at least the powerful illusion that when we do so we're doing pretty much the same things we do when we laugh at Uncle Herman's jokes, or cry at funerals. Somehow the endlessly recombining elements that make up works of fiction have their roots hooked, it seems, into the universe, or at lesat into the hearts of human beings. Somehow the fictional dream persuades us that it's a clear, sharp, edited version of the dream all around us. Whatever our doubts, we pick up books at train stations, or withdraw into our studies and write them; and the world--or so we imagine--comes alive. |
Grendel by John Gardner, 174 pages Tony Pisarenkov 17 January 2008 Enjoyed it to a surprising degree. A lot of layers and a fair amount to chew on, especially for a book that starts with such a preposterous concept. |
Freddy's Book by John Gardner, 246 pages Steven Krise 29 January 2008 |
Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner, 590 pages Steven Krise 06 April 2008 I thought it was a story of one man's slow descent to the bottom (ala Fight Club) but Gardner threw in some back to back murder mystery twists in the last 50 pages. |
The Art of Living and Other Stories by John Gardner, 310 pages Steven Krise 13 May 2008 Gardner somehow always manages to get me to care about his characters. |
Nickel Mountain by John Gardner, 309 pages Steven Krise 07 February 2009 |
Grendel (audio) by John Gardner, 0 pages Steve Gadd 23 June 2009 "My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it." |
The Resurrection by John Gardner, 244 pages Steven Krise 15 September 2009 Gardner crafts a poignant story about the death of a man in his prime as a means of showing us his aesthetic theory. |