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Guest Post, by Peter Selgin: A Sentence About a Sentence I Love

“I had a hard-on so big I thought it would pick me up and throw me out the window.”

–From Going Away, by Clancy Sigal.

This from Going Away, Clancy Sigal’s superb but mostly forgotten memoir/novel about a disenchanted fellow traveler zooming across America in a convertible red DeSoto (from Hollywood where he has worked as an agent), meeting fellow disaffected Commies en route: a sentence that does for male tumescence roughly what “In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more” does for armed combat: the sort of sentence that picks up this writer and makes him want to cheer.

Peter Selgin is the author of Life Goes to the Movies (Dzanc, 2009).

  • John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

4 thoughts on “Guest Post, by Peter Selgin: A Sentence About a Sentence I Love

  1. Well, it picked me up and threw me out the window but I didn’t give a thought how was I going to land?
    clancy

    1. I ought to have written you personally to say what I think of your beautiful book. I hope my little post here gains it more readers. (Also I suppose I could have picked a more decorous sample, but for me this one captures the book’s tough poetry.)

      Anyway I say you landed just fine.

      –Peter

  2. I ought to have written you personally to say what I think of your beautiful book. I hope my little post here gains it more readers. (Also I suppose I could have picked a more decorous sample, but for me this one captures the book’s tough poetry.)

    Anyway I say you landed just fine.

    –Peter

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