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

by David Foster Wallace (Author), Mary Gaitskill (Author), Delmore Schwartz (Author), Helen Thorpe (Author), Irvine Welsh (Author), Jerome Badanes (Author)

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 Description
Features a classic novella by Jerome Badanes and Helen Thorpe on the murder of Ireland's most famous female journalist. Plus Delmore Schwartz on T.S. Eliot's squint.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Open City Books (May 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890447161
• ISBN-13: 978-1890447168
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,089,914 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #4 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( S ) > Schwartz, Delmore
  #24 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > Welsh, Irvine
  #26 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > Wallace, David Foster

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These tiny exceptions, February 23, 2000

By	tb (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

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.