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Open City Number Five : Change or Die (No. 5)
 
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Open City Number Five : Change or Die (No. 5) [Paperback]

David Foster Wallace (Author), Mary Gaitskill (Author), Delmore Schwartz (Author), Helen Thorpe (Author), Irvine Welsh (Author), Jerome Badanes (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)


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Book Description

May 1, 1997
The most important new literary journal to emerge since Granta, Open City has published some of the best work by major writers and artists such as Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Jeff Koons, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, Terry Southern, Patrick McCabe, Sam Lipsyte, and David Berman. Edited by the writers Thomas Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck and originally published by the late Robert Bingham, writing from Open City has been included in many prestigious anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Known for launching the careers of today's best new writers, the editors are also committed to printing important unpublished work by writers from past eras, such as Richard Yates, Delmore Schwartz, Jim Thompson, Cyril Connolly, Edvard Munch, and Gregor von Rezzori. With its innovative and daring mix of the old and the new, Open City combines undiscovered writing by classic authors with a fascinating portrait of a literary generation in the making.

Open City #12 includes "After the Wall", a special section on Berlin's new generation of fiction writers; a story by Lewis Cole on the end of radicalism; and debut fiction by Sam Brumbaugh and Heather Lorimer. This issue features a previously unpublished story by Ford Maddox Ford.


Editorial Reviews

Review

Ambitiously highbrow. -- The New York Times

Open City takes the old literary format and revitalizes it for a new generation's tastes. -- The Library Journal

Product Details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Distributed Art Pub Inc (Dap) (May 1, 1997)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1890447161
  • ISBN-13: 978-1890447168
  • Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,902,564 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars These tiny exceptions, February 23, 2000
This review is from: Open City Number Five : Change or Die (No. 5) (Paperback)
How is it that the Final Opus of Leon Solomon is out of print in both hardcover and paperback?

The book's author, Jerome Badanes, died halfway through the sequel to The Final Opus of Leon Solomon. What he had written, and revised himself, was a pretty amazing 100 page novella called Change or Die which appears in Issue number #5 of Open City in its entirety.

It is always a peculiar thing when you take a piece of writing that has so much peculiar character and substance, and lump it in with all the other stuff that happens to comprise that issue of the magazine.

This issue has some absurd wild cards - when seen in the light of its central feature, "Change or Die," - such as an Irvine Welsh story he wrote shortly after completely Trainspotting, and this wonderful piece of non-sense that Delmore Schwartz wrote about T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. That is the one interesting thematic thread in this issue--Both Shwartz and the academic protagonist of Change or Die (a man trying to recover from Shakespeare,) have a certain lovely fatedness about them.

And Change or Die has one of my favorite short lead sentences:

"The Blik family was a dream and an education."

What a great beginning to such a great story!

(And what a concise and honest use of the short sentence, which has been bastardized and beaten up on any number of fronts, from Hemingway imitators to the cold pragmatism of news providers).

If this whole computer as a means to shop for books is to have any good side, then it is that finding a book like, "The Final Opus of Leon Solomon," or getting your hands on the novella "Change of Die" is something you MUST GET! If only to make use of the fact that you are sitting in front of a computer and perusing.

Jerome Badanes. He is coming back in the only way he can.

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