WRITERS' CHOICE
EDITORS ' NOTE : Writers' Choice
is a new department of short comments
on oldas well as new books that our contn'butors like particularly and want to
cali attention to.
RAYMOND FEDERMAN : Just
read
Alphabetical Afn'ca
by Walter
Abish . (New Directions .) This one
deserves more than just a sentence .
It deserves a whole article. If this is
where the American novel is going ,
there 's hope. It's short. It can be
read in two or three hours. It 's
incredible . Best fiction I've read
since . . . Beckett . . . no since
Calvino . Oh , yes , Calvino . Also just
read
Invisible Cities .
(Harcourt ,
Brace , Jovanovich .) Wow! is the
American novel still in a state of
infancy .
LEONARD MICHAELS : A mag–
nificent
labor- The Iiiuminated
Blake
(Doubleday Anchor) - all
Blake's illuminations with splendid
commentary by the most excellent
Blakist, David V. Erdman .
Vision –
ary Physics: Blake 's Response to
Newton ,
by Donald Ault.
(U.
of
Chicago Press .) A difficult , im–
mensely exciting scholarly-critical
analysis of Blake's psychomachia–
scientitis vs . Imagination-which I
had
to
read twice , and , in some
places , ten times, and it was always
worth the effort .
MARTIN DUBERMAN: My read–
ing this past year has concentrated
on the history of radicalism in the
United States and , still more heavi –
ly , on the history of sexual behavior
(in preparation for a new course and
a new book) . In both areas , a
number of the best recent books
have been ignored , under-reviewed
or stupidly reviewed . On the history
of radicalism , I want to call atten–
tion to three books: Peter H.
Wood ,
Black Majority
(Knopf:
1974. ) ; Edward Shorter and
Charles Tilly ,
Stn'kes in France,
1830-1968
(Cambridge : 1974 .) ;
and A. James Gregor ,
The Fascist
Persuasion in Radical Politics
(Princeton : 1974.). Wood 's book is
one of the few investigations of
blacks in pre-Revolutionary Ameri–
ca. It 's remarkably imaginative in
its use of source materials , confirm–
ing that much of what we assumed
to be " unrecoverable " in the past is
there to be found if traditional
investigative procedures are broad–
ened and traditional modes of
perception expanded . Shorter and
Tilly's book impressed me (as one
who has often taken issue with
quantitative history) as a splendid
example of what
can
be accom–
plished through statistical measure-
