Philip Roth on Igor Webb’s 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.”

Recent Writings

The last installment of my story sequence featuring Adam Schwermer is out in the current Salmagundi—you can find it on my This Old Writer page.

My few thoughts on the calamity in Israel have been posted by The Fortnightly Review—https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2023/11/again/

Read Igor Webb’s newest book, Buster Brown’s America: Recollections, Reveries, Reflections. Incorporating This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year (Chavagnes-en-Paillers, France: Odd Volumes of the Fortnightly Review, 2022)

The book opens with two essays about the author’s arrival in the US as a boy and his becoming, through love of reading, an “American boy.” The second section—“Writing (Mainly) About Friends” includes lauded essays on Philip Roth, Louise Gluck, and Robert Hass. The concluding section incorporates the series “This Old Writer: A Journal of a Plague Year,” a meditation on life and literature in extremity.

From the editor: “In the best tradition of American writing, the book traces the writer’s journey via the love of reading from immigrant boy to an important voice in American letters.” 

Anthony Rudolf wrote: “Igor Webb has written a light-touch not but light-weight book. With its knowingness, self-awareness and deconstructive focus, its anti-genre or non-genre composition, and its un-self-defensive irony, it does not seek to be integrated yet thanks to the projection of a charming and seductive voice, Webb has produced an instructive and entertaining book that is deeply serious without taking itself seriously.”

I learned to write by reading the great early essays of James Baldwin. He taught me how to dig so deeply into your personal history that you encounter everyone’s history, or History; but even more he taught me how American English is supposed to sound, he taught me pacing and emphasis, he taught me how to exercise the muscle of a word. When I returned to New York in 1985 after almost a decade living in England, I tried to get a job on The New Leader, because they’d published James Baldwin when no one had yet heard of him. They didn’t hire me.