1 The girl and her lover meet for the first time at a pub downtown. They had arranged this meeting over the telephone the week before and they share a liter of beer and soon the girl...arrives home or grey cloudy and fogged on summer and winter afternoons. —from Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Mirror in the Well The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 28.2 (Summer 2008).

IV That's all very fine about le mot juste but first the word must be free. — But is there not some other way? It must come about gradually. Why go down into hell when — Because words...that it is not a matter of country but the time — The time. For God's sake Charlie bring a lemon pie. So they lay in the little brook and let the cold water run up their bare bellies.

III It is Joyce with a difference. The difference being greater opacity, less erudition, reduced power of perception — Si la sol fa mi re do. Aside from that simple, rather stupid derivation...significance. — To me beauty is purity. To me it is discovery, a race on the ground. And for this you are willing to smash — Yes, everything. — To go down into hell. — Well let's look.

D.H. Lawrence, "Introduction to Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs" When we think of America, and of her huge success, we never realize how many failures have gone, and still go to build up that... It helps one to understand the world, and saves one the necessity of having to follow out the phenomenon of physical repulsion any further, for the time being. D. H. LAWRENCE BANDOL, 1929

First published in Paris in 1923 in an edition of three hundred copies, this Williams’ The Great American Novel is, in his words, "a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car falls... I have added a new chapter to the art of writing. I feel sincerely that all they say of me is true, that I am truly a great man and a great poet.   What did you say, dear, I have been asleep?

In the early 1920s in Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams had serious doubts that the "Great American Novel," as it was then conceptualized, could ever be written. Though generally known...fool me. He became very angry but understood at once that she had penetrated his mystery, that she saw he was stealing in order to write words. She smiled again knowingly. He became furious.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's influence on North American writers makes for a fascinating case study in literary influence. Is Céline a "strong poet" whose anxiety of influence has been felt on this side...previous work on Céline includes Sources et citations dans "Bagatelles pour un massacre" (1987) and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, coedited with Philippe Roussin, "Céline, USA" (1994).

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's influence on North American writers makes for a fascinating case study in literary influence. Is Céline a "strong poet" whose anxiety of influence has been felt on this side...previous work on Céline includes Sources et citations dans "Bagatelles pour un massacre" (1987) and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, coedited with Philippe Roussin, "Céline, USA" (1994).

Alice Kaplan, "The Céline Effect: A 1992 Survey of Contempoary American Writers . "  From Modernism/modernity. Volume 3, Number 1, January 1996, pp. 117-136. Notes 1 ... Saturday, 1942, quoted in Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller: A Life (New York: Norton, 1991), 308. 32 Michael Palmer, letter to author, 10 December 1991.  

Louis-Ferdinand Céline's influence on North American writers makes for a fascinating case study in literary influence. Is  Céline a "strong poet" whose anxiety of influence has been felt on this side... Alice Kaplan, " The Céline Effect: A 1992 Survey of Contemporary American Writers." From Modernism/modernity. Volume 3, Number 1, January 1996, pp. 117-136.