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“... is: who reads these books and what purpose do they serve? I can imagine looking up a name in James Hart’s fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Updated to include ‘authors not yet born when this book was first begun’, it offers abbreviated commentaries on such newly arrived figures on the scene as Diane Wakoski (1937-; cited ...”

“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... James Atlas’s The Great Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America’s poète maudit who died tragically unfulfilled in 1966, having lived out the truth of one of his best essays: ‘The Isolation of the Modern Poet ...”

“... the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to ...”

“... The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind. And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals’. This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of Partisan Review, Delmore ...”

“... match between subject and author make the series distinctive. The ‘concept’, as its editor James Atlas explained to me a few years ago, is to produce books that airline passengers can read on a flight from New York to San Francisco and finish before they reach the Golden Gate. Given the entertainment options available at 35,000 feet this is not an ...”

“... sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in ...”

“... agreed that there can be no doubt About Martina Navratilova: Since she lent her body to Charles Atlas The definition of the veins on her right forearm Looks like the Mississippi river system Photographed from a satellite, And though she may unleash a charming smile When crouching to dance at the ball with Ivan Lendl, I have always found to admire her yet ...”

“... rhymes and puns, seem the work of a writer struggling to fulfil his self-imposed schema. Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell’s third novel, has the most elaborate schema of all: six narratives embedded one within another, like a set of Russian dolls. The journal of an American notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s is interrupted midway through, and ...”

“... Somewhere around the middle of An Atlas of the European Novel, in a discussion of images of London in the 19th-century novel, Franco Moretti throws in a parenthetical aside on the whereabouts of his publisher (‘in a rather bleak part of Soho’). It’s a sort of joke, consistent with the laidback tone that Moretti seems able to combine effortlessly with high intellectual endeavour ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”

“... of documentary reportage, investigative journalism and idiosyncratic record-keeping. Take the Atlas Group, an imaginary foundation set up ‘to research and document the contemporary history of the Lebanon’. The group is devoted to creating an archive comprising both ‘authored’ and ‘found’ documents and files. One project concerned the activity ...”

“... coming from a writer who made his name – in Ghostwritten (1999), number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004) – as a globetrotter of the mind, effortlessly linking cultures from Belgium to Mongolia, channel-hopping genres from epistolary to sci-fi while soaring into the future and back again via a narrative continuum where reality blends with dream. This ...”

“... of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations ...”

“... barbaric and limited repertoire? Discussing phobias, Phillips makes fruitful reference to William James, a man who seems to grow in stature the more one reads him. James found the name ‘agoraphobia’ rather absurd; Phillips defends it neatly: the agora was ‘that ancient place where words and goods and money were ...”