Reviews
THE BOSTON GLOBE
An excerpt from
Literary Life by Cynthia Dockrell
12/3/97
How refreshing it is to pick up a showcase for fiction, poetry, drama, and art that doesn't take itself too seriously. Call Rosebud the little literary magazine that could.
It's published in Wisconsin, which could be why it's so down to earth. You won't find much writerly razzle-dazzle here (arguable exception: an Allen Ginsberg poem in the winter issue); these are workaday stories by the poor and unfamous.
A breezy yet history-filled piece by Tristine Rainer in this same issue explores the evolution of autobiography, from the pharaohs' pyramid-scrawled stories to what Rainer dubs the new autobiography. She shows how fact and fiction have always been inseparable in this kind of storytelling; today's memoirs, which rely as much on imagination as on memory, aren't the heresy they're made out to be in some quarters. New autobiography, she writes, ''having moved into the literary arena of poetry and fiction, is now concerned with the larger truths of myth and story, which permit, and sometimes require, imaginative reshaping.''
Book publishers: Are you listening?
© 1997 Globe Newspaper Company