Steven Moore (born May 15, 1951) is an American author and literary critic. Best known as the primary authority on the novelist William Gaddis, he is the author of the two-volume study The Novel: An Alternative History.
Born outside of Los Angeles Steven Moore moved to Littleton, Colorado, in 1963, where he attended Arapahoe High School (1966–69), and played bass guitar in Earthquake Moving Company, [1] one of many rock bands he was in, often playing his own compositions.
At the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, his first literary writings were poems contributed to college literary magazines. In his junior year, he switched majors from history to English, earning both a B.A. (1973) and an M.A. (1974). From 1974 until 1977 he worked as a substitute teacher while writing a novel (Clarinets and Candles, unpublished) and the beginnings of a second. [2] From 1974 to 1978 he was a member of the Colorado Ballet, dancing a variety of minor roles.
He began working at ABC Books in Denver in 1976. Two years later he opened his own independent bookstore, Moore Books, which he operated until selling it in 1981. During this time, he published his first works of literary criticism: a series of short notes on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in A Wake Newslitter, and book reviews for a Denver arts magazine called Spree. He also wrote his first book, A Readers Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions", published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1982. This was followed by In Recognition of William Gaddis, a collection of essays by various hands, for which he wrote the introduction and contributed an essay. Co-edited with John Kuehl, it was published by Syracuse University Press in 1984. A brief interest in vampire literature led to an anthology Moore edited titled Vampire in Verse, which was published in 1985.
In 1983, Moore returned to college to earn a Ph.D., first at University of Denver, then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he graduated in 1988. His dissertation was published the following year as William Gaddis by Twayne Publishers. During these years he continued to write essays for scholarly journals and book reviews for a variety of publications. (See list of publications, below.)
In 1988 Moore joined the staff of Dalkey Archive Press, a press in Illinois that also published Review of Contemporary Fiction , to which he had contributed in the past. In 1996, Dalkey published Moore's Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials. Moore was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (1988–1996), during which he contributed many essays and book reviews. Beginning in 1990, Moore started reviewing new fiction for newspapers, principally for the The Washington Post , but also for The Nation , Chicago Tribune , and the Los Angeles Times , along with reviews in scholarly journals.
Moore was let go from Dalkey Archive Press in 1996 and continued in the book trade with Borders Books and Music later that year. After working at its first Colorado store for four years, he was promoted to book buyer for the entire chain and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2001. That same year, his edition of Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli was published by (Black Sparrow Press). In addition to his buying duties, Moore was the editor of the Borders Classics line (2003-5). He was laid off in January 2010, though he continues to reside in Ann Arbor. Since then, he has supported himself as a freelance indexer for university presses.
In early 2004, Moore began writing a two-volume survey entitled The Novel: An Alternative History, with special attention to innovative works; the first volume appeared in April 2010 from Continuum Books . Reviewing it in the Washington Post, Alberto Manguel wrote, "Moore tells his story with erudition and wit, and in doing so restores to the reader of good fiction confidence in the craft." [3] In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks disliked its "gung ho tone" but concluded, "Moore's book has the great merit of listing and summarizing scores upon scores of stories" and that "reading these summaries is a pleasure." [4] The second volume, covering the period 1600–1800, was published by Bloomsbury in August 2013, and won the Christian Gauss Award for literary criticism for that year.
Moore is the leading authority on the novels of William Gaddis, which he discovered in 1975 and about whom he has written several books and essays. He was the guest speaker at two Gaddis symposia (Orléans, France, 2000, and Buffalo, New York, 2005), and assisted with the Chinese translation of Gaddis's J R published in 2008. His edition of The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
Moore has long championed lengthy, innovative novels: as he told an interviewer, "generally I like 'em big and brainy." [5] [ unreliable source? ] Novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote that Moore is a "scholar whose criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy." [6]
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William Thomas Gaddis Jr. was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction with the novel Europe Central.
Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was an innovative English novelist. His eight short novels, partly inspired by the London aesthetes of the 1890s, especially Oscar Wilde, consist largely of dialogue, with references to religion, social-climbing, and sexuality.
Felipe Alfau was a Spanish-born American novelist and poet. Most of his works were written in English.
Dalkey Archive Press is an American publisher of fiction, poetry, foreign translations and literary criticism specializing in the publication or republication of lesser-known, often avant-garde works. The company has offices in Funks Grove, Illinois, in Dublin, and in London. The publisher is named for the novel The Dalkey Archive, by the Irish author Flann O'Brien. It is owned by nonprofit publisher Deep Vellum.
Harry Mathews was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language.
Joseph Prince McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is noted for his long postmodern novels such as Women and Men.
Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson is a highly stylized, experimental novel in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. The novel is mainly a series of statements made in the first person; the protagonist is a woman named Kate who believes herself to be the last human on earth. Though her statements shift quickly from topic to topic, the topics often recur, and often refer to Western cultural icons, ranging from Zeno to Beethoven to Willem de Kooning. Readers familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will recognize stylistic similarities to that work.
The Recognitions is the 1955 debut novel of US author William Gaddis. The novel was initially poorly received by critics. After Gaddis won a National Book Award in 1975 for his second novel, J R, his first work gradually received new and belated recognition as a masterpiece of American literature.
Chandler Brossard was an American novelist, writer, editor, and teacher. He wrote or edited a total of 17 books. With a challenging style and outsider characters, Brossard had limited critical success in the United States. His novels were more appreciated in France and Great Britain.
Joel Black is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Black has written extensively on subfields of literature and film studies areas such as romanticism, postmodernism, philosophy and history of science, and cultural studies. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991) and The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (2002).
Alan Ansen was an American poet, playwright, and associate of Beat Generation writers. He was a widely read scholar who knew many languages. Ansen grew up on Long Island and was educated at Harvard. He worked as W. H. Auden's secretary and research assistant in 1948–49; he was the main author of the chronological tables in Auden's The Portable Greek Reader and Poets of the English Language.
Alexander Louis Theroux is an American novelist and poet. He is known for his novel Darconville's Cat (1981), which was selected by Anthony Burgess for his book-length essay Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 – A Personal Choice in 1984 and by Larry McCaffery for his 20th Century's Greatest Hits list.
James McCourt is a gay American-born writer and novelist who was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. McCourt has been with his life partner, novelist Vincent Virga, since 1964 after they met at Yale University as graduate students in the Yale School of Drama. McCourt's and Virga's papers are held at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Sheri Martinelli, was an American painter, poet, and muse.
Fire the Bastards! was written by Jack Green and published in his magazine newspaper in 1962. It was an acerbic critique of the book reviewing industry.
jack green is the pseudonym of Christopher Carlisle Reid, an American literary critic who was a great defender of the work of William Gaddis. Reid—who took the name from a racing form after he quit his job to become a freelance critic—particularly admired Gaddis' 1955 novel The Recognitions, which flopped upon being published. Reid believed that the commercial failure of the hardcover edition of Gaddis' novel was the result of it having been panned by literary critics. Reid's faith in Gaddis was borne out when The Recognitions was chosen as one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction is a tri-quarterly journal published by Dalkey Archive Press. It features a variety of fiction, reviews and critical essays, with emph on literature that has an experimental, avant-garde or subversive bent. Founded in 1980 by the publisher John O'Brien, the Review of Contemporary Fiction originally focused upon American and British writers who had been overlooked by the critical establishment, and in this manner the Review succeeded in bringing new critical attention to writers such as William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Metcalf, Nicholas Mosley, Donald Barthelme, and many others. In 1984, in order to begin reprinting some of these authors, John O'Brien founded Dalkey Archive Press.
My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays by Steven Moore is a collection of book reviews that were originally published in periodicals from the late 1970s onward.
Zerogram Press is dedicated to publishing contemporary literary fiction written in English. It also publishes literary criticism and essays.
