William McPherson in conversation with Michael Dirda

William McPherson, one-time daily book editor at The Washington Post and later founding editor of its Book World section, will be in conversation with current Washington Post literary critic Michael Dirda on the former’s debut novel, Testing the Current, at Politics and Prose in Washington D.C. on Saturday, January 26th at 6:00 p.m. Testing the Current was originally published to critical acclaim in 1984—Russell Banks called it “permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory”—and recent reviews concur.

“Unmarred by sentimentality, false epiphanies, or forced drama, this novel both elegantly depicts a specific class in a specific time and conveys with rare understanding and subtlety the inevitable poignancy of growing up.”—The Atlantic

“[T]he clarity and precision of the prose, the ‘American’ voice, the focus on family, memory, time, and change — all did remind me of those two great books [William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and John Williams’s Stoner]. However, despite the easy comparisons, Testing the Current held me under a spell of its own making.”—The Mookse and the Gripes

“To be heard and hearkened to.”

Such writers—and we may add John Milton, Robert Burton, and Browne to the company of the clerics—expected their prose to be spoken aloud, to be heard and hearkened to. Phrases that build on each other like interlocking bricks, melodious internal echoes, Scriptural allusions, startling imagery, and compacted paradoxes—all were meant to rouse the sleeping soul, to thrill and persuade. Every word counted, and every sentence mulled over and taken to heart.

—from Michael Dirda’s review of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall up at the B&N Review. Dirda seems particularly inspired, we credit Browne’s prose.

Robert Sheckley, Michael Dirda, and bullet-shooting bras

If Sheckley is known beyond the confines of science fiction, it is probably for “Seventh Victim,” made into a 1965 movie called “The 10th Victim” (and still fondly remembered for Ursula Andress’s bullet-shooting bra). In a future society, war has been eliminated, but man’s killer instincts remain. So some outlet for his aggression must be found. The outlet is a game, of sorts, overseen by the Emotional Catharsis Board. In it, people alternate being hunters and victims, the object being to kill — or be killed. A hunter knows the name of his victim, but the victim doesn’t know the identity of his hunter. What happens, though, when you’re Stanton Frelaine and the person you’ve been assigned to murder is Janet-Marie Patzig, a beautiful young woman with whom you find yourself falling in love?

—from Michael Dirda’s review of Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley in The Washington Post. You can read the rest of the review here.

Michael Dirda on Brigadier Gerard

Gerard’s heroic deeds embrace the entire history and geography of the Napoleonic Wars, taking place in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Russia, England, and, finally, on St. Helena. No matter where he finds himself, however, the Brigadier always thinks like a hussar: ‘Of all the cities which we visited Venice is the most ill-built and ridiculous. I cannot imagine how the people who laid it out thought that the cavalry could maneuver.’ As for Waterloo, that plain of sorrows, he writes: ‘On the one side, poetry, gallantry, self-sacrifice—all that is beautiful and heroic. On the other side, beef. Our hopes, our ideals, our dreams—all were shattered on that terrible beef of Old England.’

- Michael Dirda on The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, the adventure short stories that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote directly after killing off Sherlock Holmes, from his recently published book On Conan Doyle.

Hav, reviewed by Michael Dirda →

Michael Dirda has reviewed Hav in The Washington Post. He thinks readers will prefer the “beautifully written, nostalgic excursion to the final station stop on the Mediterranean Express” from the earlier Last Letters from Hav over the post-9/11 Hav of the Myrmidons, where “Hav has become crudely vulgar and totalitarian, its landscape shadowed by the ominous Myrmidon Tower, its government a theocracy ruled by the so-called Perfects.” 

We think readers will enjoy both, together for the first time in this edition.