My Back Pages Volume I: Reviews

Before he embarked on his massive history of the novel, Steven Moore was best known as a tireless promoter of innovative fiction, mostly by way of hundreds of book reviews published from the late 1970s onward in such places as the Washington Post, Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Nation. Virtually all of them through 2016 have been gathered for this collection, which offers a panoramic view of modern fiction, ranging from well-known authors like Barth and Pynchon to lesser-known but deserving ones, many published by small presses. Moore also reviews dozens of critical studies of this fiction, and takes some side trips into rock music and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The second volume of the book reprints Moore's best essays. Several deal with novelist William Gaddis-on whom Moore is considered the leading authority-and other writers associated with him (Chandler Brossard, Alan Ansen, David Markson, Sheri Martinelli), all of which have been updated for this collection. Others champion such writers as Alexander Theroux, Brigid Brophy, Edward Dahlberg, Carole Maso, W. M. Spackman, and Rikki Ducornet. Two essays deal with the late David Foster Wallace, whom Moore knew, and others treat such matters as book reviewing, postmodernism, the Beat movement, maximalism, gay literature, punctuation, nympholepsy, and the history of the novel.

Three threads tie together these reviews and essays: style, intertextuality, and innovation. Moore pays special attention to a writer's style, to the use of literary allusions (and learned wit), and to innovative, experimental techniques. Written in a lucid, non-academic manner, My Back Pages presents a gallery of singular artists, and provides the capstone to Moore's four-decade career.