I wonder if this book could possibly be as entertaining as this review of it:

Genoa (Paul Metcalf, Coffee House Press)

Here’s another deeply American book, reprinted this year on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Indeed, it may be the most American book I’ve seen in a long time, not counting that children’s series Rush Limbaugh writes where he travels through time to stabs redcoats. Genoa deals in seafaring, in ghosts, in mythmaking and violence. As with the Wieners collection, this was my introduction to the author, and I was glad for it. Metcalf writes through his corpse, so to speak, in the same style used and advocated by Davenport, Delany and Gass. In this novel that deep attention to the narrator’s body runs in a feedback loop with excerpts and discursions about and by Herman Melville and Christopher Columbus. The result feels shockingly au courant, as if Maggie Nelson, Eliot Weinberger or Valeria Luiselli had taken it upon themselves to gloss an Updike story.