Buster Brown's America: Recollections, Reveries, Reflections — and incorporating This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year.

Buster Brown's America: Recollections, Reveries, Reflections — and incorporating This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year.

'A volume of belles-lettres'... 'Igor Webb has written a light-touch (but not light-weight) book. With its knowingness, self-awareness and deconstructive focus, its anti-genre or non-genre composition, its un-self-defensive irony, it could only have been written now, yet it is sweetly old-fashioned: this fine critic and memoirist has produced a collection of essays, a volume of belles-lettres , like some of the books by Huxley and Edmund Wilson. It does not seek to be integrated and yet it is a whole thanks to the projection of a charming and seductive voice, whether writing about his friends, Robert Hass and Philip Roth, or a childhood favourite, such as Captain Hornblower, while taking in Dickens, the Brontes and James Bond en route — or the pandemic in journal form. Webb has produced an instructive and entertaining book that is deeply serious and yet does not take itself seriously.' — Anthony Rudolf Also by Igor Webb: Christopher Smart's Cat : 'Marvelous...inventingly told, full of intelligence, funny, often with a novelistic flair...as much like a literary miscellany as a memoir, with both genres having equally impressive heft.' — Philip Roth