Steven Moore
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Moore’s My Back Pages compiled most of the essays and reviews he had written through 2016; this new volume gathers the shorter pieces he has published since then, along with some previously uncollected writings. While the last volume focused on modern literature, this one ranges from Gilgamesh to medieval novels to books published within the last year. There are essays on old favorites (Gaddis, Pynchon, Coover, Theroux) and on new discoveries, such as an obscure Elizabethan novel and some little-known female postmodernists. Also included is a selection from the many interviews Moore has given over the years, in which he discusses his background, his motives and working methods, and his favorite authors. As the title suggests, Last Time Around closes out Moore’s fifty-year career as a devoted literary critic.
STEVEN MOORE (PhD Rutgers, 1988) is the author of the two-volume survey The Novel: An Alternative History, the second volume of which won the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship. He has written widely on William Gaddis and other modern authors, and for decades reviewed new books for the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and other periodicals. Between 1988 and 1996 he was managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press /Review of Contemporary Fiction, the subject of his memoir Dalkey Days, also available from Zerogram Press.
Reviews
“Steven Moore[’s] criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy.”
—Jonathan Franzen, THE NEW YORKER
“Zerogram Press deserves plaudits for bringing out a major work of criticism. . . . Steven Moore [has] read more fiction than anyone alive and writes about even the most demanding works with infectious zest.”
—Michael Dirda, THE WASHINGTON POST
“[Moore] may be our country’s best claim to that old-fashioned creature, ‘a man of letters,’ as it is hard to imagine anyone, certainly not in the academy, who has read more widely or who could speak, if modestly, about fiction with more easy confidence, precision, and wit.“
—Julian Anderson, FICTION WRITERS REVIEW
“One of Moore’s best qualities as an explicator is in communicating complex or complicated material in the clearest possible terms, and with humour when possible. . . . Steven Moore has been at the vanguard of criticism and publication of outliers and explorers whose artistic visions reinvigorate the capacious form of the novel and the short story, and we are in his debt.”
—Jeff Bursey, NUMÉRO CINQ
“…one man doing all he can to sustain literature upon his back like Atlas.”
—George Salis, THE COLLIDESCOPE, 10/18/20
“Moore’s writing style is not of someone lecturing from a podium, theory to the fore, but someone seated at your table who’s happy to chat with you and eager to share his discoveries.”
—Jeff Bursey, THE SEABOARD REVIEW, 8/3/26