WSJ Review of Willard Spiegelman’s Seven Pleasures

Readers of the “print product” are familiar with Willard Spiegelman’s name because it has recently begun popping up in our pages. The SMU professor and editor of the Southwest Review has written for us about the ugliness of loud restaurants and the beauty of Plano. In the May issue, he contributed a piece on the Dallas Opera. If you have read and enjoyed these ditties (and even if you haven’t), you might want to pick up his new book, Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, about which Wes Davis in the Wall Street Journal today says:

Near the end of “Self Consciousness,” his own set of memoir-essays about a more or less happy life, John Updike wondered whether a contented existence was suitable material for a memoirist. “Happiness,” he asked. “Is it a subject?” The popularity of what might be called casualty lit — books that play on their authors’ damaged lives — answers no. But Updike believed there was value in catching sight of happiness out of the corner of the eye. Looking at his pleasures, Mr. Spiegelman does just that, seven times. The eighth pleasure the book provides is in the intelligence and grace he brings to the job.

Cheers, Willard, on a well-deserved glowing review. It was charming the way you pretended to be nervous in anticipation of it.

Update: If you’d like to meet the man in person and get him to sign a copy of his book, come see him at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture on May 6. (You need to register online if you intend to attend.)

Update to the update: The good professor is very busy. Tonight at 6, you can catch him at the Degolyer Library.