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ABOUTBlack Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more) FREE SAMPLE COPYClick here to receive a free sample issue via U.S. mail. There is absolutely no obligation. SUBSCRIBESupport this independently published journal of fine essays. Annual subscriptions are $15 in the USA, $25 in Canada, $30 in the UK, or $35 elsewhere (all prices in US $). Click here to subscribe online via paypal or send a check to Black Lamb, 1759 View Drive, San Leandro CA 94577. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'All Book Issue' CategoryLast Month in Black LambVolume 8, Number 7 — July 2010July 1st, 2010 The Black Lamb Review of Books In this Black Lamb Review of Books, a seventh annual issue devoted entirely to books and reading, editor Terry Ross reflects on his springtime reading, which as included four novels by Frederick Buechner, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, two books by Jim Harrison, a Forties noir classic, and novels by Wallace Stegner, Edith Wharton, and Frederic Raphael. Greg Roberts reports on the autobiography of Isaac Stephenson, an honest politician vilified during his lifetime.
Posted by: The Editors A decent manBetrayal in WisconsinJuly 1st, 2010 BY GREG ROBERTS I like reading books that no one has heard of. The 1950 memoirs of Valentin R. Garfias, Garf From Mexico, was limited to 2,000 copies, one of which was discarded by Cal State University, Hayward, ending up at the Salvation Army store. An excellent read — and if you do read it, you are in the dozens, like Spix macaws.
Is it an important work? Very important. Obscurity means nothing. Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat languished for more than a century before it was rediscovered. And what about Moby-Dick? So there. Isaac Stephenson’s remarkable life conveys a clear message to us: people living in the mid-1800s were amazingly resourceful, resilient, and self-reliant, and we need to be more like them. We are malnourished slugs, slaves to larger machines, and mentally torpid as well, the light bulb in our brain flickering like a feeble firefly.
Posted by: The Editors June 2007 in Black LambVolume 5, Number 6 — June 2007June 1st, 2007 The Black Lamb Review of Books In our cover story Terry Ross wonders how people find time to read books and talks about the 14 books on his shelf waiting to be read. In our page 2 feature, Tales from the Crypt, Ed Goldberg reviews two books haunted by dead white American authors. In A Lot of Learning, William Bogert offers an appreciation of memoirs by Dick Francis and Anne Fadiman. Cate Garrison reviews The Bookseller of Kabul in We Believe Her. You Read It Here First: Terry Ross celebrates the reissue of Evelyn Waugh’s travel books, the 5-volume autobiography of Leonard Woolf, and Irene Handl’s wonderful The Sioux, published in 1965.
Posted by: The Editors June 2003 in Black LambVolume 1, Number 6 — March 2003June 1st, 2003 READ THIS ENTIRE ISSUE IN THE ENTRIES BELOW The All-Book Issue In this, our first All-Book Issue, Editor Terry Ross describes how close this came to being a (shudder!) All James Michener Issue. In our page 2 feature, Wondrous Land, Cate Garrison pays homage to Lewis Carroll. D.K. Holm celebrates the film critic Robin Wood. In Memorable Miss Osborne, Grant Menzies remembers the first book that made him cry. Jim Patton (Mighty Marcel) claims that Proust is the all-time best. In The Man Who Couldn’t Think Straight, Greg Roberts takes Henry David Thoreau to task.
Posted by: The Editors The All Book Issue... and the incredibly cruel All-Book Issue hoaxJune 1st, 2003 BY TERRY ROSS This month’s edition of Black Lamb — which I call the All-Book Issue — is a departure from the norm, because this magazine was created as a reincarnation of the old-fashioned literary Miscellany. Most months, that’s what it is, with the writers checking in from wherever they are — geographically, professionally, psychically — on whatever subjects or anecdotes they choose. It becomes a potpourri of different (and sometimes differing) voices and lives. But for the June issue, the halfway point in our first year, I proposed that the writers choose a book and write about it in the context of their regular columns. Not book reviews, I said, but rather essays on how influential books had changed their lives. About a month before the copy deadline, I sent a mass email to most of the contributors (a few had already sent in their articles) to remind them of this assignment. That’s when the fun started. Noting the copy deadline of April 1, one of the writers, Bud Gardner (his column's calledCountry Lawyer) copied the others’ email addresses from my message and wrote to them all, suggesting a prank. Country apparently called to country, for Emily Emerson (En Campagne) in west-central France immediately proposed that everyone write about the same book. Too hard, someone else said, we have no book in common. How about the same author, then, piped in Rebecca Owen from Pittsburgh, Pa. And thus came into being, at least conceptually, Black Lamb’s first, and certainly its last, All James Michener Issue.
Posted by: The Editors Wondrous landFinding Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell everywhereJune 1st, 2003 BY CATE GARRISON I was born a million miles away in a little village on the side of a hill… (“When you say ‘hill,’” the Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”)
Posted by: The Editors Aged in WoodJune 1st, 2003 BY D.K. HOLM I remember finding coveted film books the way most people remember where and when they first saw a favorite movie. In the case of the book Hitchcock’s Films, it was fall of 1971. I was in the Portland State University bookstore, then a massive monument to university press and special-interest books (now a textbook clearing house), with thorough holdings in most fields. After fantasizing for years about a career as either a comic book creator or a movie director, I discovered that I enjoyed reading about films more than making them. It takes a special personality type to helm the unwieldy juggernaut of a film crew. It takes no personality at all to read a book about it.
Posted by: The Editors Memorable Miss OsborneJune 1st, 2003 BY GRANT MENZIES To single out one book, any more than a whole library’s worth of them, as being of most influence on one’s development — as reader, writer, and human being — is like having to list your favorite kisses from an unforgettable lover. But I can simplify the process by counting on one hand the books which, read before age twenty, had such a powerful effect on me that the impressions remain vividly: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (which I found in my Southern grandmother’s house when I was eleven and read without stopping over the course of two days and a night); Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz (the copy given to my mother by her analyst, who curiously thought Zelda’s unhappy story would make inspiring material for my mother’s own recovery from a nervous breakdown); Ferdinand Mayr-Ofen’s The Tragic Idealist (a life of so-called Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, which set me on course for studying and writing historical biographies and put me in love with the handsome young monarch pictured in the frontispiece); and Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (which, with West’s painter’s eye and composer’s ear for coloring and orchestrating ideas and images to produce breathtakingly beautiful moods and insights, had a huge influence on my own writing style). Yet it was a children’s book, not quite fit for the above list of masterworks, that made the greatest, longest-lasting impression: Wilson Gage’s Miss Osborne-the-Mop.
Posted by: The Editors Mighty MarcelJune 1st, 2003 BY JIM PATTON Call me a Proust snob. Whatever. I’d rather be that than one of these “well-read” people who’ve never had the experience of A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) or who tell you
Posted by: The Editors The man who couldn’t think straightJune 1st, 2003
Thoreau messed me up pretty bad. I read Walden at seventeen, and it turned me into a non-materialist for most of my life. As a result, I endangered my family by driving them around in a hundred-dollar Peugeot 504 with bald tires that were ready to blow any second. I thought I was saving the planet. I’m better now. We have a thousand-dollar Toyota van with new tires. I’ve lost some respect for Thoreau. He’s a wonderfully clever writer, but he couldn’t think straight. The imprisonment at the pond, in a hell-hole of a cabin, slaving over a goddamn bean patch, would have driven anyone to suicide, except for one thing — he was writing the book. With the inspiration of his art, it didn’t matter where he was. Same for Beethoven. His drive to compose music made him oblivious to his filthy room with the many unemptied piss pots. Anyone without a major artistic project had better stay away from a Walden situation. Better to exist in a studio apartment with a part-time job at Burger King and a basic cable package.
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