The Reading Room:
A new literary quarterly
Premier Issue now available.

Spring 2000

 FROM THE PREMIERE ISSUE.. . 

I'm a woman into magical realism, an avid reader of Garciá Márquez, the Allende gal and their high-flying disciples." 
JUAN GOYTISOLO

...the helium of Holiday's beauty filled me and I floated up over the night, hearing everything and nothing... I would pursue Holiday through this glamorous jungle as the cannibals had Betty Boop's sidekicks." 
STANLEY CROUCH

The art critic Rosamond Krauze...considered Picasso's switch from Cubism to Neoclassicism a betrayal. Betrayal...a word used about treason or sexual cheating? In other words, if you make a choice of something from the past over something modern you should be hung."
LARRY RIVERS

In a subterranean sense Proust was an orphan on the lam navigating his own inner world. Far from being a whining invalid, he was as alert as any street orphan, any picaro, in his hyper-attenuated sense of physical danger and keenly honed ability to sight possible paths of salvation." 
BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON

The trick was to get out of being a nobody by harnessing yourself to a somebody who was, deep down inside, a nobody, too. The trick was to give status to your own woundedness. So I went and wrote a letter to Woody Allen." 
DAPHNE MERKIN

Her real name was Teresa. Teresa Fleishman. Irish mother. Jewish pop. Half hillbilly, half princess...She took her mother's surname of McCoy because she thought her father was a thug. She wanted roots in the soulful south, not the airheaded pacific Northwest." 
CARL WATSON

Orange balloons dotted the ceiling of his daughter's room. No, there were none at all, it was only the afternoon light. Prashant remembered saying goodbye to his father once when he was very young. Augustin had explained the gravity of the demonstration, of answering Gandhi's call." 
E.M. CHAKKAPPAN

I felt alone. I felt alone with my kind of small town patriotism in an age that couldn't care less. That spat on it." 
CONVERSATION WITH JOHN UPDIKE

AND YOU WILL ALSO FIND...

...the work of Lionel Abel, Linsey Abrams, Madison Smartt Bell, Avi Dresner, Stuart Engesser, Kenneth Koch, Don Maggin, John Buffalo Mailer, Mark Mirsky, Yvonne Murphy, Michele Tolela Myers, Julie Obaso, Cara Prieskorn, James Purdy, Julián Ríos, J. Schwartzman, Maria Solomon. Cover artwork: Larry Rivers. 

Look forward to our next issue this Fall featuring: Joseph Roth, the Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Clancy Sigal on LA, and an excerpt from a new translation of Charles-Louis Philippe's great classic Bubu of Montparnasse

"Bubu stood for Paris as some of Dickens' novels stand for London...Philippe had a gift which is rare enough...to be able to select, out of personal experience, what is really significant." 
T.S. Eliot . 

The Reading Room is published by Great Marsh Press P.O. Box 2144, Lenox Hill Station, NY, NY 10021—tel: (212) 946-4522. All Great Marsh books are distributed by Ingram and are available at all bookstores including online booksellers.