LibraryThing Author:
Karl Wolff

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Member: kswolff

CollectionsYour library (5,225), Wishlist (1,887), Currently reading (7), To read (45), Read but unowned (169), All collections (7,257)

Reviews416 reviews

Tagsfiction (1,322), novel (828), non-fiction (495), France (198), poetry (158), UK fiction (154), history (152), series (143), gay (136), art (97) — see all tags

MediaNot set (20), Book (7,234), Paper Book (6,973), Audiobook (7), Ebook (107), Video Recording (2), DVD (1), Other (1)

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud, tag mirror

Recommendations10 recommendations

About meI'm a voracious reader. I love fiction and non-fiction. I also write fiction, speculative fiction, and book reviews.

I review fiction and non-fiction books at The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (http://www.cclapcenter.com/index.html), The New York Journal of Books (http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/), The Joe Bob Briggs web
site (http://www.joebobbriggs.com/) and my own blog "The Driftless Area Review" (http://driftlessareareview.com/). Follow me on Twitter and/or Like me on Facebook (links below).

I'm also a member of the National Book Critics Circle (bookcritics.org).

To publishers and authors: If you are interested in having me review your book, send a query letter to driftlessareareview @ hotmail . com. I will send you information on where to address the review copy. I will read pretty much anything put in front of me.

Reviewing books via Early Reviewers, the Joe Bob Briggs website, the New York Journal of Books, and CCLaP have exposed me to hidden gems amidst the dross and slag. I've also found rare and forgotten treats on the shelves of used bookstores and places like Goodwill and Savers.

A quick glance of my Library and my reviews should give you a good picture of my tastes, preferences, and interests.

My tastes are pretty scatter shot. I like the Great Writers (Proust, Pynchon, Beckett, etc.) as well as more popular commercial stuff like Andrew Vachss, James Ellroy, and Warhammer 40K novels.

About my library"The library represents, maybe with the prison, the last of the uncontested moral universes. The moral goodness of the library is intimately connected to the conceptual value of the book" -- "CONTENT" by Rem Koolhaas

"Eyestone's rooms, like his own dense prose, suggested a point of view: diverse, adorned, amused, premeditated, filled with details, highly inclusive." -- "Laura Warholic" by Alexander Theroux

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." -- "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

"But I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever have time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. ... Thank God for them all, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have the starveling appetite for things human, which I hope you will never have." -- "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson.

"He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US." -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn according to Gore Vidal (1980)

"It is all harmony of artifices, of deliberate contradictions. Let us try to note some of these. Realism and idealism are mingled. Along with description that takes extravagant pleasure in the most dismal details of physical reality there is, at the same time, refined expression of ideas and beliefs that exceed the immediate impression made on us by bodies -- There is a union between of the most profound sensuality with Christian asceticism." -- "Les Contemporains ("Baudelaire")" by Jules Lamaitre

My library is an amalgamation of a lifetime. It's an example of wide-ranging, generalist taste, everything from fiction to non-fiction, pop to High Art and everything in between.

GroupsDalkey Archive, Erotica, Fans of Joyce Carol Oates, In Translation, Infinite Jesters, Nabokov!, New York Review Books, Proust, Pynchon Pandæmonium, Rare, Old or Offbeatshow all groups

Favorite authorsDan Abnett, Kathy Acker, R. Scott Bakker, J.G. Ballard, Honoré de Balzac, Iain M. Banks, Wayne D. Barlowe, Roland Barthes, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Bernhard, Sven Birkerts, Roberto Bolaño, Anthony Bourdain, Anthony Burgess, Max Cannon, Robert A. Caro, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, E. M. Cioran, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Nicole Cushing, Mark Z. Danielewski, Geof Darrow, Robertson Davies, Dougal Dixon, J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, William O. Douglas, James Ellroy, M.F.K. Fisher, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Stephen Jay Gould, Robert Hass, Alan Hollinghurst, Robert Hughes, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry James, M.P. Johnson, Seth Kaufman, Galway Kinnell, Donna Kossy, Tony Kushner, Norman Mailer, William Manchester, Karl Marx, John McPhee, Daniel Mendelsohn, Mike Mignola, Barbara Mor, Vladimir Nabokov, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ovid, Camille Paglia, Adam Parfrey, William Pfaff, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Monty Python, John Rechy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Marquis de Sade, Severo Sarduy, Simon Schama, Rainer W. Schlegelmilch, Will Self, Jean Shepherd, Joel Shepherd, Gilbert Sorrentino, Rene Staud, Preston Sturges, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alexander Theroux, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Thompson, Andrew Vachss, Gore Vidal, William T. Vollmann, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Weissman, Joss Whedon, John Sibley Williams, Cintra Wilson (Shared favorites)

Favorite publishersAkashic Books, Archipelago Books, Arsenal Pulp Press, Beacon Press, Cleis Press, Delirium Books, Feral House, McFarland, NYRB Classics, Penguin Australia, Pomegranate, Process Media, The Library of America, Wave Books, Yale University Press, Zone Books

Homepagehttp://driftlessareareview.com/

Also onFacebook, Twitter, Wordpress

Membership LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Member Giveaway

LocationMilwaukee, WI

Account typepublic, lifetime

URLs /profile/kswolff (profile)
/catalog/kswolff (library)

Member sinceSep 12, 2008

Currently readingA Strangeness in My Mind: A novel by Orhan Pamuk
The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement: UK & USA, 1979 - 1993 by Robert Forbes
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism by Chris Jennings
Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture by Stijn Alsteens
The Combinations by Louis Armand
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