Category
Reviews
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Use and Reuse: Dancing Again with Robert Rauschenberg
“Looking at the Rauschenberg archives was a revelation to me. I’ve never handled a silkscreen, and physics and geometry weren’t my best subjects in high school, but even I could see how ‘Set and Reset’ could be recreated because of the Rauschenberg studio’s meticulous records management.”
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Lahiri, High and Low
Before beginning graduate school, I promised myself that I would never write about Jhumpa Lahiri. I had studied Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake (2003), in a maddening undergraduate literature course called “Good Girls, Bad Girls,” and at the time, it represented everything I sought to resist: “model minority” mythology; ethnic assimilationist imperatives; diasporic nostalgia. The Namesake had…
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Cassandra, Retiring
I spent a good portion of 2010 playing the Cassandra, mongering doom and gloom about the heat death of the alternative comics universe.1 Despite some important works—chief among them James Sturm’s Market Day, Chris Ware’s Lint (an entry in his ongoing Rusty Brown), and Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s remarkable miniseries, Daytripper—ominous signs seemed unmistakable:…
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Working Girls
“A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance,” writes Hannah Horvath (played by show creator Lena Dunham) in the final episode of the second season of the HBO series Girls. This literary gem is the first, and only, sentence of an ebook for which Hannah has already received and spent…
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Her Mother and Herself
Do you hear a sound like rolling surf in the self-help section labeled “Family”? It’s what a sea change sounds like in its early stages, when one paradigm is fading away and another surging forward. Drifting away is the idea of the repressive family, out to “fuck you up,” in Philip Larkin’s phrase of 1971.1…
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Shallow Botany
A birth is a fine way to begin a novel, so it is not in itself a bad sign that Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, The Signature of All Things, opens with the delivery of its protagonist, Alma Whittaker. The scene echoes Gilbert’s earlier novel, Stern Men (2000), which also began with the birth of a…
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For World Literature
You could tell the story of literary study in the US as one long process of expansion. For hundreds of years only the Classics were considered worthy of serious academic attention, and strenuous objections followed the introduction of modern literature courses in the 19th century. While Latin and Greek “inculcate a certain manly and just…
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Jean Stafford, Antisocialite
Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize last fall was hailed as a victory for the novel’s neglected stepsister, the short story. What struck me most about Munro’s win was how well she has fared by following a heavily beaten path. She faithfully adheres to the rules Edgar Allen Poe set out for the genre in the 1840s:…
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Ordinary People
Edwidge Danticat has a way of making small lives tell big stories. Gently and quietly, she writes the outrageous and compels us, her readers, to become intimate with tragedies that are at once particular and global. From her very first novel, the 1994 best seller Breath, Eyes, Memory, which made her something of a literary…
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Sentient Instruments
Things had been tough since Dee got back from Iraq. She and her husband were sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. “I’m sorry you’re not getting laid,” she snapped at him, “but I’m still seeing my buddies get killed in my head!” One night, they sat down to watch Transformers with their three-year-old daughter. As…
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The North Is the Dark Place
“The North is the dark place.” The first words of The Daylight Gate will not be surprising to readers familiar with Jeanette Winterson’s gothic upbringing in the north of England (200 Water Street, Accrington, Lancashire, to be precise). In both her brilliant debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), and her recent memoir,…
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Wonders of Destruction in Arabic Fiction
Historians of war and society would like to believe that military conflicts have fixed beginnings and ends. Conventional depictions of the Lebanese civil war are no exception and typically confine that conflict within the notional temporal parameters of 1975–90. But the key aggravating features generally identified with the events of the Lebanese civil war—class resentments,…
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Positive Discomfort
The cover of Miriam Katin’s graphic memoir Letting It Go is striking: against a backdrop of horizontal bars of red, white, and yellow, a woman dressed in black has opened her palm to release a balloon emblazoned with a swastika, which floats up and bleeds off the top right edge of the book. The title…
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New York’s Austerity Man
At times, New York City politics can seem like midnight television, the same sitcom reruns airing in an endless cycle. Such was the feeling this fall, when former Mayor David Dinkins released his new memoir, A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic, at the apex of the mayoral campaign. Shortly after it came out,…
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After a Queer Fashion
The exhibit currently on view at the Museum at FIT, “A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk,” ends on a note of progressive triumphalism: the final installation is a triptych of gay wedding attire from the past several years. We see, to the right, a pair of entirely conventional white wedding…
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Periphery to Periphery
Paris, New York, and London: these are the world literary capitals that have historically attracted and nurtured aspiring artists, who in turn have mythologized such cities by lovingly evoking them in their work.1 literature.” The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 24–30. ] But after so many repeat…
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Storybook Plutocracy
George Packer’s The Unwinding is a minor masterpiece of the social-disintegration genre—a beautifully written, clinically observed story of the slow-rolling economic transformation that has, over the …
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Less Vital Phenomena
A recent New York Times profile of Anthony Marra, the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, notes that “until the Boston Marathon bombings most Americans paid little attention to Chechnya.”1 Though Marra, whose novel is set against the backdrop of the Chechen Wars, is clearly an exception to this generalization, variations on the same…
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Pop Justice
Sonia Sotomayor is not the only Supreme Court justice with a good story to tell. The tales of Thurgood Marshall or Clarence Thomas are, in some ways, no less dramatic. But Sotomayor may be unique in that she sees the promotion of her story as her most essential mission as a Supreme Court justice: “It is…
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Virtual Roundtable on The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
First published in 1965, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a reference volume for poetry enthusiasts and literary scholars alike. Last year, a significantly revised fourth edition appeared, covering 110 nations, regions, and languages, and with 250 new entries on subjects ranging from “boustrophedon” (bidirectional texts) to “hip-hop poetry” and “anthem, national.” Public…
