David R Slavitt: 7 books

Praise for David R. Slavitt “Slavitt’s touch is light, and he writes beautifully.... His satire is sharp, and he can be wildly funny.”—New York Times Book Review “One of America’s most lucid and classical poets.... Slavitt’s attitude is, as one would expect of a Hebrew...

What happened to the real Alice? Lewis Carroll was known to have his special "child friends," and in David R. Slavitt's bold novel, Alice Liddell is part of trio of girls once favored by the author of Alice in Wonderland. One grows up to be an actress, another runs a brothel, and Alice comes to have...

An accomplished poet and a keen observer of the human condition, David Slavitt deploys both skills to create the whimsical, insightful, and witty poems of The Octaves. In these graceful but often blunt, slyly humorous eight-line poems, Slavitt notes the passing of decades and the loss that entails,...

A tabloid reporter finds inspiration in the one kind of story that needs no exaggeration: the incomparable, the incredible, lives of the saints... The reporter's assignment: a documentary series on a mass shooter's victims. His favorite theologian: Nicolas Malebranche, a 17th-century French monk in search...

While waiting for results from a prostate exam, a writer turns to the example of Marcel Proust and Dr. Édouard Brissaud, Prousts model for Dr. du Boulbon in "The Guermantes Way" and the man who first documented Gilles de la Tourettes Syndrome. With the Frenchmen in his head and his diagnosis hovering,...

Directly or obliquely, while reading Gibbon or shopping for toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, Slavitt addresses, invokes, or simply enjoys the civilization that has been the poet's true subject from the time of the wandering bards. Upon the foundation of technical mastery, he has begun to build an oeuvre,...

This volume of poetry illustrates a new side of the author of The Carnivore and Suits for the Dead. The wit, the toughness, the shining lyric clarity of the earlier books are still here, but they have been joined by a quiet understanding, a joyfulness, and an acceptance of things as they are that...