Library of America

[Mark Kohut]

The volumes would have been, I suggest: V, Lot 49 and GR....(GR shorter by
far than Underworld and so)
Vineland, Slow Learner and M& D.  Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. The few
non-fiction pieces MIGHT be here too BUT
since never collected, I doubt it. This might be the reason a couple pretty
major stories of Roth's are NOT in his LOA editions.
Never in a book.

On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 4:47 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> Hello Back---
>
> The LOA "philosophy" is, usually ,to do all, almost all, of an author. The
> original model was the French Plieade editions. I was tangentially "there"
> due to a boss who thought this pup was smart enough to be asked questions.
> This American pup did not even know of the French Plieade editions, lol...
> https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/books/reading-and-writing-an-american-pleiade.html?searchResultPosition=1
>
>
> All that a writer wants to call his "Collected Work" if that person,
> as Roth was and DeLillo is, is still alive.  Preparing and publishing such
> a prolific writer all at once is not optimal for sales. Library budgets
> are annual, so........I cannot imagine not continuing with DeLillo.
>
> They take a lot of work and money to get done.
>
> It is my circumstantial-evidence-only opinion that Pynchon has rejected,
> will continue to reject, any LOA treatment..Or else he would have
> been there before some we know. Remember when Candida got* Gravity's
> Rainbow* into the elite Everyman's Library editions---catalogued
> and everything---then Tom left her for Melanie and that edition never ever
> appeared.(I'll bet this was part of Tom's unhappiness with Candida, who was
> a force beyond her writers sometimes.... Remember when V was a Modern
> Library edition---I have
> that edition and is the one I finished it with---until it wasn't? I'll bet
> Tom killed that too....
>
> For similar reasons for why he would never give a Nobel speech, he does
> not want his fiction in such elite-segregated form, imo.
>
> Mark
>
> On Tue, Aug 8, 2023 at 3:42 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello all
>>
>> I've been reading the first LoA volume of Don DeLillo's 80s novels (a
>> second volume covering the 90s will be out later this year). I would agree
>> it is the high point of DD's career overall, but I wonder if the two
>> volumes will be it. Which also leads me to wonder whether Pynchon will be
>> so presented in future (fwiw, I think it may be hard to form a collection
>> for those writers who have written several large novels like Pynchon or
>> Gaddis)
>> I do intend to next read the Portis LoA collection discussed here
>> previously.
>>
>> rich
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>