The other day I finished Harold Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.

Brodkey is a hard nut to crack: his stories obviously got worse as he went on, shifting subtly from a fictive mode something like Faulkner and Woody Allen in one unholy cigarettes-and-booze-fueled combination into florid dialectically-rendered monologues. One of the early stories was a real delight - involving a self-consciously Jewish fella entertaining an uptight German friend and her new husband the Count until an old friend of his, freaking out on acid, drops in and causes havoc. But with the later ones I found myself just skimming. Some weird stuff in this book involving childhood sexuality especially, very acutely observed and he doesn't seem to have been aiming for shock. I've looked a little into his Runaway Soul but didn't get far - I found his This Wild Darkness one of the most horrifying things I've read in a long time, it was written as he was dying of AIDS and it's unsparing in its explication of all the details of such a death.

Now working on Rosalind Belben novels. Pretty great so far!