Tag
Literature
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The Golden Age of TV
“Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better.”
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Memoir 2.0; or, Confession Gone Wild
Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s first confessional memoir—unless, of course, you count her name. As Strayed recalls about a third of the way through Wild, she authored that briefest of autobiographies on a set of no-fault divorce papers in 1994. Obsessed by the blank line where she was to write her new name, she toyed with…
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To Chuck or Not to Chuck
Cricket has a certain charge in writings on the postcolonial world as a site of political contestation between decolonized subjects and their former colonial masters. Scholars such as C. L. R. James, Arjun Appadurai, and Simon Gikandi have written of cricket as a central part of the “colonial ecumene” (Appadurai) in India and the West…
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Don’t Say “Etc.”: Lost and Found in the Work of Ivan Vladislavic
In a piece titled “Practical exercises,” Georges Perec gives some instructions on how to set down a city street in words: Note down what you can see. … Don’t say, don’t write “etc.” Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything,…
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Into the Crud
How can a book transform how we think about the human? It is one thing to claim for oneself, as does a character in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a dispossession so thorough that she lives with “No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity,” prompting her father to add, “like a dog.” It…
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Fatwa: A Love Story
Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton, is much like his career to date: great until about halfway through. One ought to feel worse about taking such a cheap shot. Over the last three decades, Rushdie has been one of the finest novelists working in English. The loose tetralogy that began with Midnight’s Children (1981) and…
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Coming of Age on the Council Estate
In recent months, three of Britain’s most important writers have published new novels. J. K. Rowling’s earnest The Casual Vacancy, Martin Amis’s comic Lionel Asbo, and Zadie Smith’s ambitiously experimental NW differ from one another in a good many ways, but they converge in their focus on a single subject: council housing. Like public housing…
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When the Past is Past
Set sometime in the early 1950s, Toni Morrison’s latest work of fiction centers on a 24-year-old black veteran of the Korean War named Frank Money, recently returned from the frontlines and showing signs of psychological disturbance. Home opens with Frank escaping from a Seattle mental hospital and making his way by bus across a still-segregated…
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Jinn in the Machine
G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is an unusual, exciting work of urban fantasy that broadens the usual meanings of “urban” and “fantasy.” What does it mean, the novel asks, for a person to turn to or away from faith? What kind of magic is needed to allow disenchanted, half-secularized young citizens of the Arab…
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China, Middlebrow to Highbrow
Fiction has more than one way of distancing itself from the real. In most cases this distance serves as a prelude to a future homecoming. The story, like some interstellar traveler, flings itself around the gravity well of a larger and more distant planetary object (the fictional) in order to assure the speed and accuracy…
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Why Does the Historical Novel Need to be Rescued?
Hilary Mantel has won two Booker Prizes for her re-imagination of the court of Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, the first two installments in a planned trilogy narrating one of the most famous and most represented episodes in English history. Reviews of both books inevitably begin with a…
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Asian American Literature and the Price of Failure
Don Lee’s The Collective explores the politics of Asian American culture through the story of three characters: Joshua Yoon, Jessica Tsai, and Eric Cho. A Korean American from Mission Viejo, California, Eric serves as the narrator, but the book revolves around Joshua, a Korean orphan adopted by two liberal Jewish professors at Harvard. An egotistical…
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Churches of Vinyl: Archive and Authenticity in the Pop Music Novel
The recent publication of yet another big novel centrally preoccupied with popular music—Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, one of whose key locations is an East Bay record store in 2004 specializing in used jazz, soul, and R&B vinyl records—invites consideration of what Rick Moody has recently observed is the surprisingly ubiquitous presence, in recent literary fiction,…
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Islamic Desire
An Arab Melancholia seems tailor-made for the contemporary cultural wars between liberal humanists and Islamic fundamentalists. “Abdellah Taïa,” the book’s blurb declares, “is the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco”—not only a Moroccan gay writer but the first one to write autobiographically about his own gay life and to be published in Morocco…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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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…
