Steven Gilbar
Author of Bibliotopia Or, Mr. Gilbar's Book of Books & Catch-all of Literary Facts And Curiosities
About the Author
Image credit: www.speakingofstories.org
Works by Steven Gilbar
Bibliotopia Or, Mr. Gilbar's Book of Books & Catch-all of Literary Facts And Curiosities (2005) 279 copies, 7 reviews
Chicken A La King And The Buffalo Wing: Food Names And The People And Places That Inspired Them (2008) 51 copies, 8 reviews
Published and Perished: Memoria, Eulogies, and Remembrances of American Writers (2002) — Editor — 41 copies, 1 review
Not Forgotten: American Writers Remember the Lives of Literary Mentors, Friends, & Rivals (2006) 22 copies
The book book 1 copy
Not Forgotten 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Gilbar, Steven
- Birthdate
- 1941-08-07
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Michigan (BA)
Wayne State University (JD) - Occupations
- lawyer
editor
writer - Organizations
- Speaking of Stories (founder)
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Detroit, Michigan, USA
- Places of residence
- Detroit, Michigan, USA
Santa Barbara, California, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: We know the names on both sides of these coins; both the authors whose lives are celebrated, and the names of their friends performing the celebration. And what a list it is: Emerson on Thoreau, Henry James on Lowell, Howells on Twain, O'Hara on Fitzgerald, Tate on Eliot, Davenport on Merton, Merrill on Bishop. If there is a published pantheon in which the best of a writer's life and work is recorded for posterity by their closest friends, this book show more contains the holy scriptures. Here is a selection of well considered (and often shockingly honest) appraisals of the greatest names in American literature memorialized, eulogized, and sometimes criticized by their dearest friends and their closest peers. All are personal; many are poignant and in every case the reader reaches the final sentences knowing far more about the subject than before, not as they would from a scholarly entry in a biographical dictionary, but at first hand, close up, encomia written in flesh and blood.
These memoria consistently manifest an urgency on the writers' part to convey the personal, the intimate, the unknown. Katherine Anne Porter writes of Flannery O'Connor, "I want to tell what she looked like and how she carried herself and how she sounded standing balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches," John O'Hara starts his appraisal of Fitzgerald with the observation, "It is granted that Scott Fitzgerald was not a lovable man, but most of the time he was a friendly one, and that characteristic, in a man of his professional standing, is as much as anyone can ask."
Personal, forthright, and honest, these appreciations sound the notes of our literary past that still resonate in our minds.
My Review: I love browser books. Those tapas of the brain that publishers so seldom do really well, anyway. I like quotes, as I suppose is fairly obvious to anyone who's paid the slightest attention to me, for much the same reason as I like these all-too-rare interesting short-subject browsers: They point me at things I've never considered looking into, and remind me of pleasures I once experienced, and occasionally both together.
An example of the latter is the memoriam piece by Jonathan Yardley of one of my literary icons, Eudora Welty. I've derived huge pleasure out of reading Miss Eudora's stories, and a little less from reading her novels. I've never sought out her essays, for some reason, and now I think I must:
Now I must, with almost a starved hunger, seek out and consume these hitherto unsuspected morsels of beautiful writing and clear thought that are Miss Eudora's essays. And all because I am a browser, a grazer, and I buy and hoard these weird collections of odd stuff like the memorial essays written by their peers to recently passed writers.
This sort of book isn't easy to do well because there is so much oddball cultural flotsam around that it's very hard to select a wide, but consistently good, sampling of it. Most often the entries into this genre are single-author collections like [52 McGs] or [Up in the Old Hotel], both delightful books; but they're one person's work, and therefore a certain level of accomplishment can be expected. How much tougher the task the editors of this volume set themselves, and how much more pleasing the fact that they succeeded.
As beautiful as any sentences Porter ever wrote, or any O'Connor did. A rare pleasure to encounter such a heartfelt and simultaneously a clear-eyed assessment of a person's life and work: O'Connor was defined and consumed by disabling illness, and still had the spirit and strength to stand on her failing legs and whistle for peacocks. Don't know about you, but as a way for someone to remember me, that would make my ghostly ectoplasm glow with pleasure.
So make the effort to find one of these marvelous brain-snack boxes, and dip your weary-of-pretense or simply worn-out-from-outrage toe into a pool of good writing about good, dead writers. show less
The Publisher Says: We know the names on both sides of these coins; both the authors whose lives are celebrated, and the names of their friends performing the celebration. And what a list it is: Emerson on Thoreau, Henry James on Lowell, Howells on Twain, O'Hara on Fitzgerald, Tate on Eliot, Davenport on Merton, Merrill on Bishop. If there is a published pantheon in which the best of a writer's life and work is recorded for posterity by their closest friends, this book show more contains the holy scriptures. Here is a selection of well considered (and often shockingly honest) appraisals of the greatest names in American literature memorialized, eulogized, and sometimes criticized by their dearest friends and their closest peers. All are personal; many are poignant and in every case the reader reaches the final sentences knowing far more about the subject than before, not as they would from a scholarly entry in a biographical dictionary, but at first hand, close up, encomia written in flesh and blood.
These memoria consistently manifest an urgency on the writers' part to convey the personal, the intimate, the unknown. Katherine Anne Porter writes of Flannery O'Connor, "I want to tell what she looked like and how she carried herself and how she sounded standing balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches," John O'Hara starts his appraisal of Fitzgerald with the observation, "It is granted that Scott Fitzgerald was not a lovable man, but most of the time he was a friendly one, and that characteristic, in a man of his professional standing, is as much as anyone can ask."
Personal, forthright, and honest, these appreciations sound the notes of our literary past that still resonate in our minds.
My Review: I love browser books. Those tapas of the brain that publishers so seldom do really well, anyway. I like quotes, as I suppose is fairly obvious to anyone who's paid the slightest attention to me, for much the same reason as I like these all-too-rare interesting short-subject browsers: They point me at things I've never considered looking into, and remind me of pleasures I once experienced, and occasionally both together.
An example of the latter is the memoriam piece by Jonathan Yardley of one of my literary icons, Eudora Welty. I've derived huge pleasure out of reading Miss Eudora's stories, and a little less from reading her novels. I've never sought out her essays, for some reason, and now I think I must:
The novelist works neither to correct nor condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive. ... Fiction writing is an interior affair. Novels and stories always will be little by little out of personal feeling and personal beliefs arrived at alone and at firsthand over a period of time as time is needed. To go outside and beat the drum is only to interrupt, interrupt, and so finally to forget and to lose.--from "Must the Novelist Crusade?", 1961
Now I must, with almost a starved hunger, seek out and consume these hitherto unsuspected morsels of beautiful writing and clear thought that are Miss Eudora's essays. And all because I am a browser, a grazer, and I buy and hoard these weird collections of odd stuff like the memorial essays written by their peers to recently passed writers.
This sort of book isn't easy to do well because there is so much oddball cultural flotsam around that it's very hard to select a wide, but consistently good, sampling of it. Most often the entries into this genre are single-author collections like [52 McGs] or [Up in the Old Hotel], both delightful books; but they're one person's work, and therefore a certain level of accomplishment can be expected. How much tougher the task the editors of this volume set themselves, and how much more pleasing the fact that they succeeded.
I want to tell what she looked like and how she carried herself and how she sounded standing balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches, whistling to her peacocks who came floating and rustling to her, calling in their rusty voices.--Katherine Anne Porter, about recently passed legend Flannery O'Connor
I do not want to speak of her work because we all know what it was and we don't need to say what we think about it but to read and understand what she was trying to tell us.
As beautiful as any sentences Porter ever wrote, or any O'Connor did. A rare pleasure to encounter such a heartfelt and simultaneously a clear-eyed assessment of a person's life and work: O'Connor was defined and consumed by disabling illness, and still had the spirit and strength to stand on her failing legs and whistle for peacocks. Don't know about you, but as a way for someone to remember me, that would make my ghostly ectoplasm glow with pleasure.
So make the effort to find one of these marvelous brain-snack boxes, and dip your weary-of-pretense or simply worn-out-from-outrage toe into a pool of good writing about good, dead writers. show less
Truly a delightful, useful, and often surprisingly imaginative selection of recommendations of books one is all too likely to overlook or even to be altogether unaware of. Many a time have I praised the day I bought it in a Berkeley bookstore, because in 25 subsequent years I have never laid eyes on another copy.
Though the essays were interesting, they did not speak to me. I am not a learned reader who only wants improving books by the 'best' writers. It seemed to me that every single author of these essays was exhorting the reader to only read 'good books' or books that are 'good' for you. It is not how I read and I don't like reading writers that put me down because I don't conform to their narrow view of what reading should encompass. That I am lesser because I read 'trash'. I am not ashamed of show more what I read..my reading covers a spectrum and I acknowledge when a book is too highbrow and defeats me. There are classics I want to read that I might not live long enough to get to but reside on my Kindle waiting..just in case I get a brainstorm...like Gibbon's Decline and Fall. I have given up on Proust..his language is beautiful but the story bores me and the people irritate me. I loved Moby Dick but not enough to reread it and I am a rereader. So, this was an a look into the minds of people like: Thoreau, Proust, Robert L. Stevenson, Henry Miller, Emerson, Nabokov, Robertson Davies, Graham Greene...I have read at least one book by each of them and so appreciate them as writers but I do not necessarily hold with their personal opinions on reading. show less
What do Emerson, Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino all have in common beyond the fact they were all great authors? They all wrote fascinating essays on the art of reading books. Steven Gilbar, a lawyer who is foremost a reader, selected and edited a delightful compilation of essays on books and reading for this tantalizing book, Reading in Bed. The essays range from those by classic authors like Montaigne, Hazlitt and Ruskin to modern notables like Marcel Proust, Henry Miller, Italo Calvino and show more Graham Greene. The entries from notable essayists include a couple of my favorites: Joseph Epstein and Sven Birkerts. The essay by Robertson Davies whose final paragraph is quoted above reminds me of the pleasure I have gained from rereading books that I love, most of which would be considered great. Some of those readings have been spaced out over my life while others have been bunched together in the several decades of my maturity. They include disparate writers and genres but all are books that I look forward to reading again. I have enjoyed rereading massive classics like War and Peace, Middlemarch and The Man Without Qualities along with smaller classics like Jane Eyre, The Razor's Edge and The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland.
The one thing all the essays share is a transcendence and the ability to trigger new insights into the text and its message for my life. These essays enlarge upon the experience of reading and act as a catalyst for further reading.
The inclusion of a bibliography provides suggestions for further reading in the essays of these authors on subjects that are likely to be almost as interesting as that of reading. The compilation maintains a high level of excellence throughout without losing its entertainment value, at least for passionate and serious readers. I keep it by my bedside. show less
The one thing all the essays share is a transcendence and the ability to trigger new insights into the text and its message for my life. These essays enlarge upon the experience of reading and act as a catalyst for further reading.
The inclusion of a bibliography provides suggestions for further reading in the essays of these authors on subjects that are likely to be almost as interesting as that of reading. The compilation maintains a high level of excellence throughout without losing its entertainment value, at least for passionate and serious readers. I keep it by my bedside. show less
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