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"Shrek" producer John Williams is producing the film through his new company 3QU Media.

The post ‘Nut Job’ Director Peter Lepeniotis Signs On For 3QU’s ‘Gnome Alone’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Glen Keane and Kobe Bryant are making an animated project together.

The post Glen Keane and John Williams Team Up With Kobe Bryant for ‘Dear Basketball’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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The moral outrage at the actions of Islamic State (IS) is easy to both express and justify. An organisation that engages in immolation, decapitation, crucifixion and brutal corporal punishment; that seemingly deploys children as executioners; that imposes profound restrictions on the life-choices and opportunities of women; and that destroys cultural heritage that predates Islam is despicable. What drives such condemnation is complex and multifaceted, however.

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Here are some handpicked titles from our Coming Attractions page. Want to include your book? Just read our Share Your New Book with GalleyCat Readers post for all the details.

The Crimson & The Frost by James Colletti & John Williams: “Billy finds himself in a town full of mystery and wonder, built by the legendary Crimson Wizard and his devoted followers. The residents had lived here in peace for centuries, protected by a powerful magic jewel known as the Heart of Polaris. It is their only defense against the wicked and covetous King of Winter who wants them cast out of the lands he claims are his alone.” (September 2013)

(more…)

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By Kathryn Kalinak

This year’s slate of contenders includes established pros (John Williams, Thomas Newman, Alexandre Desplat) along with some newcomers (William Butler and Owen Pallett, Steven Price). This used to be a category where you had to pay your dues, but no longer. The last three winners had never been nominated before. So the real surprise winner in this category would be Williams.

William Butler and Owen Pallett: Her

Click here to view the embedded video.

Butler and Pallett already have a pocketful of awards and this is just the kind of “outsider” score (Butler and Pallett’s first nomination) that Academy voters love: remember Reznor and Ross winning for The Social Network? A win for Butler and Pallett makes the Academy seem hip and edgy and cool, not unimportant to an aging votership. Gravity is the favorite to win here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the statuette goes to Her. Its use of acoustic instruments (that piano!) brings coziness to the sterile interiors and even the electronic instruments radiate warmth. The score is crucial in helping us to understand the characters in the film and feel for them. This wouldn’t be the same film without the score.

Alexandre Desplat: Philomena

Click here to view the embedded video.

Desplat has done some remarkable work in the last few years (Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, The King’s Speech, The Queen, Harry Potter, Fantastic Mr. Fox—a personal favorite) and he’s the go-to composer for films about England and now Ireland. But he’s perennially overlooked by Academy voters (he’s lost five times in the last seven years and for some amazing work—come on, Academy)! I don’t think this is his year. Philomena doesn’t have a high enough profile in the Oscar race. I would LOVE to be wrong about this. Desplat deserves an Oscar for something and why not for Philomena—it’s a heartfelt film with an equally heartfelt score.

Thomas Newman: Saving Mr. Banks

Click here to view the embedded video.

Newman has twelve nominations and no wins but I don’t think this year is going to change that. Saving Mr. Banks was almost completely overlooked by the Academy (this is its only nomination) and Newman’s style of big symphonic scoring hasn’t found favor in recent years with Academy voters. (See John Williams below).

Steven Price: Gravity
*clip from film includes “Debris” from the soundtrack

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gravity is the front runner here. The trailer’s tag line reads “At 372 miles above the earth, there is nothing to carry sound.” Except the soundtrack…which is filled with the score. Big, noticeable, dare I say it—intrusive, this is the kind of score you can’t fail to notice…even if you try. John Williams meets Hans Zimmer.

John Williams: The Book Thief

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is Williams’ forty-ninth nomination—but The Book Thief doesn’t have the visibility of other films in this category and Academy voters of late have failed to embrace the kind of big symphonic scores, like this one, that routinely won Oscars back in the twentieth century. Lush, melodic, memorable—vintage Williams. Like Newman for Saving Mr. Banks, Williams would be an upset.

Will win: Steven Price for Gravity

Should win: William Butler and Owen Pallett for Her

Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College. Her extensive writing on film music includes numerous articles as well as the books Settling the Score: Music in the Classical Hollywood Film and How the West was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. She is author of Film Music: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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The post Best Original Score: Who will win (and who should!) appeared first on OUPblog.

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By Robert Morrison

Two hundred and one years ago this month, along the Ratcliffe Highway in the East End of London, seven people from two separate households were brutally murdered. News of the atrocities quickly spread throughout the country, generating levels of terror and moral hysteria that were not seen again until three-quarters of a century later when Jack the Ripper launched his savage career in a neighbouring East End district. Britain had no professional police force until 1829, and so the task of apprehending the killer (or killers) fell to an ill-coordinated group of magistrates, watchmen, and churchwardens who were woefully unprepared for the pressures of a major murder investigation, and who struggled to reassure a terrified populace that justice would be served. “We in the country here are thinking and talking of nothing but the dreadful murders,” wrote Robert Southey in December 1811, safe in his Keswick home three hundred miles from London, but still badly unnerved. “I…never had so mingled a feeling of horror, and indignation, and astonishment, with a sense of insecurity too.”

The killing began near midnight on Saturday, 7 December 1811, when an assassin passed quietly through the unlocked front door of Timothy Marr’s lace and pelisse shop. Once inside he bolted the door behind him and then ruthlessly dispatched all four inhabitants. When the alarm was raised and the door unlocked, eye-witnesses saw Marr’s wife Celia sprawled lifelessly. Marr himself was dead behind the store counter. His apprentice James Gowen was stretched out in the back near a door that led to a staircase. Downstairs in the kitchen, three-month-old Timothy Marr junior was found battered and dead. All four victims had their throats slashed. Twelve days later — again around midnight, again in the same East London area — it all happened a second time, on this occasion in the household of John Williamson, a publican. Williamson himself was found dead in the cellar. He had apparently been thrown down the stairs. His throat was cut. His wife Elizabeth and maid Anna Bridget Harrington were discovered on the main floor, their skulls bludgeoned and their throats slit.

Authorities quickly rounded up and interviewed dozens of people. One of them, John Williams, an Irish seaman in his late twenties, was questioned before the Shadwell magistrates on Christmas Eve, and then sent to Coldbath Fields prison to await further investigation. Suspicion grew as circumstantial evidence mounted against Williams, but before the magistrates could re-examine him, he hanged himself in his prison cell. The circumstances of his death were widely interpreted as a confession of guilt — much to the relief of some of the magistrates — and on New Year’s Eve Williams’s body was publicly exhibited in a procession through the Ratcliffe Highway before being driven to the nearest cross-roads, where it was forced into a narrow hole and a stake driven through the heart. Several officials, however, immediately raised doubts about Williams’s guilt, and in The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders (1971), P. D. James and T. A. Critchley conclude that Williams could not have acted alone, if he was involved at all, and that he may even have been murdered in his prison cell by those who were responsible, an eighth and final victim in the appalling tragedy.

To Thomas De Quincey, the finer points of the investigation mattered little. What impressed him was the audacity, brutality, and inexplicability of the crimes, and in his writings he returns over and over again to the Ratcliffe Highway, always attributing the murders solely to Williams, and exalting, ignoring, or altering details in order to exploit his deep and diverse response to the crimes. In his finest piece of literary criticism, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823), De Quincey introduces the satiric aesthetic that enables him to see Williams’s performance “on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway” as “making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied with any thing that has been since done in that line.” Yet De Quincey also peers uneasily into the mind of the killer in order to reflect on the psychology of violence. In Macbeth, he asserts, Shakespeare throws “the interest on the murderer,” where “there must be raging some great storm of passion — jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred — which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.”

Williams is also at the heart of De Quincey’s three essays “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In the first, published in 1827, De Quincey grazes the brink between horror and comedy as he argues with energetically ironic aplomb that “everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle… and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically…that is, in relation to good taste.” Twelve years later, in the second essay, he employs the same satiric topsy-turviness, but in this instance he inverts morality rather than suspending it. “For if once a man indulges himself in murder,” he observes coolly, “very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.” Finally, in the 1854 “Postscript,” De Quincey changes direction, returning fitfully to the black humour of the first two essays, but concentrating instead on impassioned representations of vulnerability and panic, and in particular on the horror of an unknown assailant descending on an urban household which is surrounded by unsuspecting neighbours. In its coherence, intensity, and detail, the “Postscript” is De Quincey’s most lurid investigation of violence.

The three “On Murder” essays had a remarkable impact on the rise of nineteenth-century decadence, as well as on crime, terror, and detective fiction. De Quincey is “the first and most powerful of the decadents,” declared G. K. Chesterton in 1913, and “any one still smarting from the pinpricks” of Oscar Wilde or James Whistler “will find most of what they said said better in Murder as One of the Fine Arts.” More recently, the British television drama Whitechapel (2012) has exploited De Quincey’s fascination with the Ratcliffe Highway killings, as have authors including Iain Sinclair, Philip Kerr, and Lloyd Shepherd. “May I quote Thomas De Quincey?” asks the murderer politely in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994). “In the pages of his essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ I first learned of the Ratcliffe Highway deaths, and ever since that time his work has been a source of perpetual delight and astonishment to me.” Most compellingly, in his forthcoming thriller Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell makes De Quincey the prime suspect in a series of copy-cat murders that terrify London in 1854. Morrell’s two detectives Ryan and Becker discover that De Quincey’s “Postscript” has just been published, and that in it “the Opium-Eater described Williams’s two killing sprees for fifty, astoundingly blood-filled pages — murders that by 1854 had occurred forty-three years earlier and yet were presented with a vividness that gave the impression the killings had happened the previous night.” De Quincey’s response to Williams ranged from gruesomely vivid reportage to brilliantly satiric high jinks and penetrating literary and aesthetic criticism. In his hands, violent crime became a subject which could be detached from social circumstances and then ironized, examined, and avidly enjoyed by generations of murder mystery connoisseurs and armchair detectives who enjoy the intellectual challenge, rapt exploration, and satiric safety of murder as a fine art.

Robert Morrison is Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He has edited our edition of Thomas De Quincey’s essays On Murder, and his edition of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings is forthcoming with Oxford World’s Classics next year. Morrison is the author of The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the James Black Memorial Prize in 2010. His edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was published by Harvard University Press in 2011. His co-edited collection of essays, Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: “An Unprecedented Phenomenon” is forthcoming with Palgrave. Read his previous blog post on John William Polidori and The Vampyre.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Image credits: (1) Newspaper illustration depicting the escape of John Turner from the second floor of the King’s Arms after he discovered the second murders December 1811. London Chronicle via Wikimedia Commons. (2) The Funeral of the Murdered Mr. and Mrs. Marr and infant Son. Published Dec 24, 1811 by G. Thompson No. 43 Long Lane, West Smithfield. London Chronicle via Wikimedia Commons. (3) Ratcliffe Highway Murders Reward poster offering 50 pounds for information on the murders of the Marr Family, December 1811, London Chronicle via Wikimedia Commons. (4) Procession to interment of John Williams. Published Jan’y 10 1812 by G Thomson no 45 Long Lane Smithfield. London Chronicle via Wikimedia Commons. (5) Book cover used with the author’s permission.

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John Williams, the editor of The Second Pass book review site, has been hired as a web producer at The New York Times books section.

This morning, he tweeted the news: “couldn’t be more thrilled to be the new web producer for the books section of the New York Times.”

Here’s more about the new producer: “Williams, lives in Brooklyn, NY. From 2001-2007, he worked in the editorial department at HarperCollins. Before that, he spent time as a journalist in Texas and an editorial intern at Harper’s Magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Slate, McSweeney’s, Stop Smiling, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, and other publications.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

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I’ve known since I was a kid that I liked music.  But it was only recently that I realized I am truly a music dork.  You, too, might be a music dork if:

1. You know how to play more than five instruments.
2. You take every music theory quiz around, hoping to prove that you are the smartest of all your musical friends.
3. You knew you would marry your date when he pointed out the composer (John Williams) of the movie score (The Lost World) at the same time as you.
4. You loved going to church just so that you could harmonize, and your absolute favourite church songs had the alto (or whatever you sing) lead.
5. You know all the intervals by song, your favourite being the minor seventh, “There’s a Place for us” from West Side Story.
6. You own this shirt: http://www.zazzle.ca/music_dork_shirt-235093160855329110
7. When you refer to deceased musical geniuses, you say that they are decomposing.
8. You spent a good portion of your childhood harmonizing with your Nintendo.
9. You are now extremely proud of your son for his ability to harmonize with his Wii.
10. You’re mentally (and proudly) making your own list to add to mine.

Image via Wikipedia

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I’ve known since I was a kid that I liked music.  But it was only recently that I realized I am truly a music dork.  You, too, might be a music dork if:

1. You know how to play more than five instruments.
2. You take every music theory quiz around, hoping to prove that you are the smartest of all your musical friends.
3. You knew you would marry your date when he pointed out the composer (John Williams) of the movie score (The Lost World) at the same time as you.
4. You loved going to church just so that you could harmonize, and your absolute favourite church songs had the alto (or whatever you sing) lead.
5. You know all the intervals by song, your favourite being the minor seventh, “There’s a Place for us” from West Side Story.
6. You own this shirt: http://www.zazzle.ca/music_dork_shirt-235093160855329110
7. When you refer to deceased musical geniuses, you say that they are decomposing.
8. You spent a good portion of your childhood harmonizing with your Nintendo.
9. You are now extremely proud of your son for his ability to harmonize with his Wii.
10. You’re mentally (and proudly) making your own list to add to mine.

Image via Wikipedia

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It's all Mr. Waggish's fault.

Since the marvelous book publishing arm of the NY Review of Books reprinted John Williams's little-known novel Stoner, I've noticed mentions of the book here and there, and I had even picked it up a couple of times in bookstores. There was something mysteriously attractive about the cover (part of a Thomas Eakins painting). But I always hesitated because the novel was praised for its realism, and because the central character is an unexceptional professor at the University of Missouri in the first half of the 20th century. (No, the book is not the sort that has a sequel called Pothead. It was published in 1965 and the central character's name is William Stoner.) The people praising the book, I figured, were probably the sorts of people who truly like books about unexceptional professors at midwestern universities. I am not that sort of person.

But then Waggish wrote about it. Mr. Waggish has extraordinarily good taste, is better-read and more intelligent than I, and every book I have sought out because of him has been satisfying (indeed, I owe some of my enthusiasm for Christopher Priest's works to him -- and in a nice bit of overlap, NYRB is bringing out a new edition of Priest's The Inverted World next month with an afterword by John Clute).

So I went out and got a copy of Stoner. And it is, indeed, the most satisfying novel I have read in a long time, a novel that reminds me more of Virginia Woolf than of the realistic academic novels it ostensibly resembles -- regardless of its setting, characters, props, and prose, the experience I had of reading it felt in some ineluctable way like the experience of first reading Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse.

In the introduction to Stoner, John McGahern quotes an interview with Williams by Brian Wooley. "And literature is written to be entertaining?" Wooley asked. "Absolutely," Williams replied. "My God, to read without joy is stupid."

I'm sure that there are many things about reading, writing, and teaching that Williams and I would have disagreed about had we had the opportunity to discuss them (he died in 1994, the year of my high school graduation), but I love that: "My God, to read without joy is stupid."

And the marvelous thing about Stoner is that it is a joy to read, as compelling a novel as any thriller, I think, though certainly in a different, and far more nourishing, way. That this is true is a small miracle, because it is, after all, a novel about an unexceptional professor in the first half of the twentieth century, and it contains many of the basic elements of the most soporific and trivial novels of its genre: skirmishes amongst the faculty, a bad marriage, successes and failures in the classroom, an affair with a student.

Waggish is right that much of what allows Stoner to work so well is its "unremitting gravity", but there are novels about similar characters, settings, and situations where the unremitting gravity succeeds at nothing other than squashing the petty into the trivial. Williams, though, is a master of applying the gravity in the most effective ways: to the details, to the sentences, to the narrative structure. McGahern in his introduction is correct to note that Williams's portraits of his characters are complex and affecting, and that even the minor characters grow vivid in our imaginations. The contexts of those characters' lives are equally important -- the novel begins with Stoner's childhood life on a farm, moves to his life at the university, and glimpses the world beyond that he is isolated from: the world of wars and commerce. Despite his isolation, the world reaches in at him, dropping death and desperation.

When young, Stoner and his only two friends discuss what they think is the purpose of the university. His friend David Masters says, "Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive. The True, the Good, the Beautiful...." Then Masters offers his own view:

It is an asylum or -- what do they call them now? -- a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent. Look at the three of us -- we are the University. The stranger would not know that we have so much in common, but we know, don't we. We know well.

He then points out what they each have that makes them fit only for the world of the university. Of Stoner, he says:

Who are you? A simple son of the soil, as you pretend to yourself? Oh, no. You, too, are among the infirm -- you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky. You're bright enough -- brighter anyhow than our mutual friend. But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there's something here to find. Well, in the world you'd learn soon enough. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you'd always expect the world to be something it wasn't, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place in the world."

Not much later, Masters goes out into the world and gets blown to bits by the Great War. Stoner stays in school and lives, but his life takes few truly happy turns. He marries impulsively and badly, he makes an implacable enemy who soon has power over him until nearly the moment of Stoner's death, he finds his only moments of lustful, sensitive joy with a woman who will have to flee from him to save them both.

Yet Stoner is not the tragic character in the book. If there are tragic characters, they are some of the people around him, particularly his wife and daughter. Stoner's talent is his adaptability, his passionate passivity. He loses much of what he has, but at least, for a while, he has it -- his wife and daughter seem never to have anything, though it's only partially Stoner's fault. More than any person, circumstances and society are to blame, and one of the wonders of the book is that even its most vicious characters seem trapped in their roles, helpless against the forces and systems that shape them into who they are. Everyone is marginalized in one way or another and grasping at whatever edge they can crawl across to make their way toward some imagined center.

Stoner, then, is a novel about power and its damages, about figuring out ways to live when you're not cut out to live in the world.

Except there's more to it than that, and reducing the book to its power dynamics is much too reductive indeed. Because even though this is a novel about a man who limits his life to the asylum of the university, it has an expansiveness to it. Part of this expansiveness, this vastness comes from the narration -- while we are mostly stuck inside Stoner's mind and perceptions, we are not limited to his mind alone. Now and then we see things he could not see, and the narrator breaks into omniscience every few chapters. From the very beginning, we are offered Stoner's life as a whole, a kind of bio blurb that is the first paragraph:

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: "Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues."

The rest of the book will add complexity to this portrait, but will never entirely contradict it (though it becomes clear that there are times when Stoner is a relatively popular teacher). The complexity the following pages add is not simply that of details of Stoner's life, but rather a complexity built from attention and lyricism. Our interests are directed, our attention is manipulated. We discover the individual in what is superficially unexceptional. As Stoner's portrait grows fuller, the words used to create that portrait gain poetry. We slow down and zoom in, and therein the magic lies. Here, for instance, is the end of Chapter XI (of XVII), a paragraph that loses something out of context, but which will, I hope, give a glimpse of the beauties herein:

Once, late, after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness. The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything -- the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars -- seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself. With a curiously reluctant relief he again snapped on his desk lamp. He gathered a book and a few papers, went out of the office, walked through the darkened corridors, and let himself out of the wide double doors at the back of Jesse Hall. He walked slowly home, aware of each footstep crunching with muffled loudness in the dry snow.

Though Williams has been compared to Willa Cather, and I can certainly see the comparison, here I again think of Woolf, and this time not the novels, but rather one of the most wondrous essays ever written: "The Death of the Moth". The comparison has something to do with the quality of time, the squeezing of an entire universe of living and dying, breathing and seeing, moving and resting and falling and flying -- squeezing an entire universe into a moment of perception.

There is much else to remark on, much else I would like to quote and celebrate within the book, but I'll stop with a final observation: Stoner's specialty is Medieval literature, and his world is one in which the Medieval (though not only that) assumption that physical characteristics are reflections of interior states is a true one. This is most clear with the character of Stoner's nemesis, Hollis Lomax, who is first described as "a man barely over five feet in height, and his body was grotesquely misshapen. A small hump raised his left shoulder to his neck, and his arm hung laxly at his side." Later, Stoner's entire career will be nearly ruined by his trying to hold a student accountable who has become a favorite of Lomax -- a student who has, Lomax himself says, "an unfortunate physical affliction that would have called forth sympathy in a normal human being." Both men are portrayed as physical and ethical cripples (the word occurs multiple times). Every other character of any importance also possesses physical traits that reflect their personalities, and their bodies change when their personalities do (most strikingly in the case of Stoner's daughter). Names of characters, too, are often suggestive, if not specifically allegorical or ironic (Stoner, his daughter Grace, Masters, etc). In the real world of morality, such ideas are at best quaint, at worst genocidal (phrenology, anyone?), but within the let's-pretend world of a novel, the effect is, if not mitigated, at least mixed with the coherence it provides to the book as a whole: the physical world is an extension of the interior world and vice versa; those worlds are also expressed in the world of all that is named. Within this world -- so realistic on its surface, so much a fantasy when probed -- the signifier and signified are alligned and unified.

Unity is one of the themes of the book, the difficult-to-obtain unity of flesh and spirit, mind and heart -- a unity essential to life. Toward the end of his life, Stoner reflects on the passion that has often seemed to elude him:

Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. ... He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

*Or maybe it was just that it's published by NYRB -- I have sometimes bought their books purely because of the packaging. If there were one series of books I could have a complete set of, it would be these. Aside from being tastefully packaged, they are well chosen -- a number of books I've wanted to see back in print have found their way through NYRB. (My edition of J.F. Powers's stories, though, completely fell apart, so I'm a bit skeptical of the bindings of their bigger books, but I've had no trouble with the fewer-than-500-pages ones.)

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