Amber Sparks
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading, and why. One Note 004: Amber Sparks, David Jones, The Sleeping Lord.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Amber Sparks.
Right now I’m reading The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments, by Welsh poet David Jones. It took a lot of doing to get my hands on a used copy of this sadly-out-of-print book, but it’s been worth it so far. Jones is utterly brilliant. I wanted to read this after I read Jones’s In Parenthesis, which is thankfully in current release through the wonderful New York Review Books editions. In Parenthesis was so amazing and profound and fractured that I fell in love with Jones’s mind immediately. He wrote about so many of the same topics that I’m obsessed with: WW I, myth and legend, religion, warfare, history, memory, culture, empire, etc. And I’m working right now on a novel that sort of spans those same themes, so I knew I had to get my hands on The Sleeping Lord. It’s mostly set during the Roman Empire but sort of swims in a soup of all those topics.
Amber Sparks’s work has appeared in various places, most recently in PANK, Annalemma, Dark Sky, Barrelhouse online, Used Furniture Review, Unsaid, and the New York Tyrant. She writes for the literary blogs Vouched and Big Other, and is the fiction editor at Emprise Review. She lives in Washington, DC, and usually be found at www.ambernoellesparks.com.
