Category
Reviews
-
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.”
-
Boomer Do-Over: Stephen King’s “11/22/63”
Where were you when JFK was assassinated? This is the first of eleven discussion questions appended to the new paperback edition of 11/22/63, Stephen King’s time-travel novel. The questions precede other Book Club Kit features designed to help groups of readers “travel back” to the period: a Q & A with the author, a playlist…
-
Edward St. Aubyn and the Depressive Third Person
Few recent novelists offer as many misguided reasons for being liked or disliked than Edward St. Aubyn, whose five Patrick Melrose novels—Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother’s Milk (2006), and At Last (2011, published in the United States in early 2012)—have been the occasion of some glowing press. Sensationalism is the…
-
Scientific Semitism: Exceptional or Exemplary?
For at least 1,500 years, the Jewish people have defined themselves through genealogical practices: according to Jewish law, a person is Jewish simply because he or she is born of a Jewish mother. If there is one belief that defines Judaism and the Jewish people, it is belief in the existence of Jewish collectivity, genealogically…
-
A Godlike Science
Is there something missing from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? One would think that an author’s say over her work’s substance would be final. Yet the novel’s prolific adaptations seem obsessed with filling in the gory details that Shelley avoids. The latest such homage, Frankenstein, by Dave Morris and inkle Studios, reworks Shelley’s text as an interactive…
-
Native Noir
The Round House is, arguably, the first foray into genre fiction for celebrated Native American novelist Louise Erdrich, and the result is a gripping whodunit. The crime: the brutal rape and attempted murder of an Ojibwe woman, Geraldine Coutts, on a …
-
Graphic Fables of Old New York
Two recent books serve as potent reminders of the ongoing historiographic obsessions of graphic narrative. Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn and Mark Siegel’s Sailor Twain are both ambitious historical graphic novels that return to early periods of New York history. Using strikingly different visual styles and narrative techniques, both create deeply haunting fables that, like much of…
-
The City as Literary Field
Sujan Singh Park is a tiny neighborhood by Delhi standards—more of a large square than a full-fledged “colony,” as the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of South Delhi are called. But this one happens to be where the city’s linguistic, social, and architectural capitals meet. Madhu Jain, a chronicler of the Indian arts scene, describes Sujan Singh Park…
-
Time to Occupy Silicon Valley? The New Tech Capitalists
Within 25 years, a life of “possibility,” including clean water, energy, education, information/communication, health, and freedom, will be attainable for all. So claims Abundance, a book that cites and has been glowingly reviewed by some of the most brilliant and successful science and technology entrepreneurs on the planet. And yet, in its rush to breathlessly…
-
Turn, Turn …
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, set in the near future, begins with an “invisible catastrophe” known as the slowing, a gradual deceleration of the earth’s rotation that extends days and nights, disrupts crop cycles, and even alters the effects of gravity. The novel’s title, however, refers to a far more distressing phenomenon: middle school, “the…
-
The Mom Problem
For hard-core fans of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home—and we are legion—the publication of its follow-up, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, was a major event …
-
The Anti-Revolutionary Science
Speaking to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City last October, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs placed himself squarely on their side, saying, “You are doing a magnificent job. This is how history is made. This is how this country is going to turn. Anything I can do, I’m going to…
-
The Epistolary Terrorist
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, opens with an announcement that what follows is not a novel at all: Editor’s Note: With the exception of footnote annotations, the author’s acknowledgments, the editor’s afterward, and a supplemental article included with permission, all material herein has been reprinted verbatim from the confession…
-
Dress-Up Games with Russian History
In 2002, the Kremlin-affiliated youth group Moving Together staged a public protest on Moscow’s Theater Square at which they threw the works of several prominent Russian postmodernist authors into an outsized papier-mâché toilet. In particular, they accused Vladimir Sorokin, who had achieved great acclaim in the preceding decade for his rather dense brand of conceptualist…
-
Can Objects Be Evil?
Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed…
-
Lost and Found: Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, Aimee Phan’s ambitious first novel, makes a striking contribution to the growing field of Vietnamese diasporic literature. As bearers of a traumatic history of colonization, war, and displacement, authors from the Vietnamese diaspora face the difficult task of negotiating a relationship with this past, and of determining the form and…
-
Bolaño to Come
The English-speaking world has canonized Roberto Bolaño with astonishing rapidity. It’s not surprising that this consecration has begun to provoke skepticism among Spanish-speaking critics who concede Bolaño’s importance but detect a condescension to Latin American writing in the fervor of the Anglo acclaim. Some caution does seem warranted: when a writer earns comparisons to Coltrane,…
-
Can’t Stop Screaming
Every line of Antigonick is printed in boldface handwriting, emphatic, as if something urgent and excessive has to be loudly said. The title and the format suggest that this is a translation of Sophocles’s Antigone with illustrations. From the start, however, contemporary elements intervene: stage directions are inserted within brackets, characters cite contemporary critics, and…
-
The Persistence of Monarchy
“It is a mistake to think that the British monarchy persists only as an anachronistic institution, grafted awkwardly if beguilingly onto our modern celebrity-obsessed culture.”
-
Binocular Vision, or Anne FrankDoesn’t Live Here Anymore
Do we know how to talk about Jewish writers when they are not talking about Anne Frank? Around the time that Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award this past spring, Nathan Englander published a new collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About…
