Fin Keegan

FOR A PERIOD of six months towards the end of the 1990s this reviewer read for the Fiction Department of a major New York magazine of no small pretension and more Names in its past and present than, well, one could easily shake a stick at. My job in those haunted halls was simple: to read (i.e. to reduce; to liquidate) the Slush Pile, a Ionescian execresence of paper that was crawling up one wall of the office and threatening to choke a much-traversed shortcut through to the sanctum of the Literary Editor, a man who had already suffered his share for art (some of it at the hands of the Italian riot police, but that’s another story). This mound of unsolicited short fiction, a slow-motion volcano crudely distributed in Post Office bins as if by an Emergency Response team, was the most famous–and certainly the biggest–such heap in the world. Escaping it meant, and still means, instantaneous transformation of a life, the literary equivalent of triumphing on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. Read MORE of my review of Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams