• 09 Feb 2010 07:40

  The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover

  Graeme Wood

  

  If ever you have reason to step out of an airport in Peru, Kenya, or another of the places in Ted Conover's latest book of reportage, you will preserve your life by following one simple procedure. Ignore the scrum of eager cab drivers at the door and instead proceed to the edge of the parking lot.

  • Katherine Dunn on Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson by Wil Haygood
  • Alexander Provan on Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular edited by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh
  • Caleb Crain on The Jolly Fellow

  • Salinger: "Recluse" with an ugly history of women

    How we've all found a convenient way of avoiding the truth about his …

  • Andrew Young's Revenge

    Say this for John Edwards and Andrew Young, the author of a chilling …

  • Remembering John Murtha

    John Nichols His Iraq War debate with Dick Cheney called to bring the …

  • Polish author Olga Tokarczuk walks her Polish tangle around Amsterdam …

  9:00AM

  Feb 9 2010

  Death and the afterlife

  

  From The New Yorker, is there a better way to be bereaved? A review essay by Meghan O’Rourke. You are diagnosed with a terminal illness: Do you want your physician to deliver the news to your face, and if so, when, and how? A Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes. How we feel, deal with and talk about death and transition is an ongoing, evolving process. A review of Last Acts: Discovering Possibility and Opportunity at the End of Life by David Casarett. An article on a hard choice for a comfortable death: Sedation. When does death start?: A new approach to organ donation doesn’t require waiting until the donor’s brain death. From Metapsychology, a review of A Commonsense Book of Death: Reflections at Ninety of a Lifelong

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    Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular edited by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh

    Harry Smith's fragmented art eludes his earnest interpreters

    Alexander Provan

    When the filmmaker, painter, ethnographer, occultist, and occasional vagrant Harry Smith died in New York's Chelsea Hotel in 1991, he left behind 166 boxes of belongings. They contained such treasures as Chinese papier-mâché masks, an illustrated manuscript on string figures (which he noted were "produced by all primitive societies" and "the only universal thing other than singing"), and countless sets of collectible cards, among them Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards, the Aleister Crowley

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    Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon

    The art of correspondence from Keats to Burroughs

    Adam Kirsch

    Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever: People and Their Letters is not the history of letter writing its subtitle seems to promise. Instead, it is an amiable, very readable collection of brief essays about dozens of correspondents, almost all of whom were not just "people" but professional writers. Mark Twain and Colette, Bruno Schulz and Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs and H. L. Mencken: These are not individuals you would want at the same dinner party, but they would all grudgingly admit to belonging

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    Hua Hsu on The Faith of Graffiti by Jon Naar, introduction by Norman Mailer, Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, and Born in the Streets: Graffiti edited by Hervé Chandès

    Hua Hsu

    As a major serving in the British military during World War II, Jon Naar witnessed a way of life reduced to rubble. In the winter of 1973, as a fifty-something photojournalist living and working in New York, Naar once again saw a devastated landscape. But here the names of the young and dispossessed—often no more than a handle and maybe a number corresponding to the street the kid lived on, like Junior 161 or Stay High 149—were being spray-painted everywhere: bus shelters, handball courts,

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    A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997 by Cornelius Castoriadis

    The annals of an antinomian socialist

    Scott McLemee

    In the summer of 1967, subscribers to the obscure far-left theoretical journal Socialisme ou Barbarie received notice that it was suspending publication and that its sponsoring organization, familiarly called SOUB, had dissolved. This cannot have come as too great a shock. Two years had passed since the last issue. But the shuttering of SOUB marked the end of an important collective project within the anti-Stalinist left, one whose influence was felt well beyond France. SOUB had started life in

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  Feb 9 2010

  San Francisco

  Wednesday, March 3 7:00pm

  • Sam Lipsyte and Adam Haslett

  • "What It Feels Like for a Girl"

  • • Philadelphia

  • Sheila Heti: On Being an Artist

  • Maggie Nelson: On Color

  • Hannah Frank: Deconstructing Disney

  • Joe McCulloch: Odd Manga

  THE MOVIEGOER

  Spy Kid

  Bilge Ebiri

  

  He had rarely paused to consider matters of class; as a pervert he was above such vulgar forms of definition. —Peter Jinks, Hallam Foe Making drastic changes to a novel while adapting it for the screen is one thing, but doing so when the novelist is a close friend can induce

  • Yen for Books

    A used-book store in Tokyo provides an unusual lens on japanese culture.

  • Rocketship in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, is a destination for anyone serious about comics.

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    Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!

    Fletcher Hanks’s bleak comics vision is rediscovered

    Matt Madden

    There is a man in a blue suit and a green and red skullcap piloting a red plane across a yellow sky. Crossing a lush jungle valley, he spots thousands of “gigantic royal panthers” and instantly declares: “I CAN USE THEM IN MY PLAN TO WRECK CIVILIZATION!” Though the colorful and crudely drawn adventure comics gathered in I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! read like the fevered imaginings of Henry Darger’s bully older brother, they are, in fact, the garish and terrifying work of Fletcher

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    Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 by Tim Lawrence

    A musician's biography charts a diverse and sprawling scene

    Every art has its day, and so maybe does every city and every neighborhood. Lower Manhattan—Greenwich Village, SoHo, the East Village, and the Lower East Side—saw an explosion of poetry and painting, music and dance, over much of the past century. But from the early '60s to the '90s, the performing arts flourished. They flourished in myriad genres, music especially, and devotees of one aspect of the scene—whether conceptual performance art, minimalist composition, experimental dance and

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    A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff

    Sandra Newman

    The jacket copy for Joanna Smith Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age compares the book to Mary McCarthy’s The Group; in the acknowledgments, the author calls it “an homage” to that 1963 novel. Neither reference prepares the reader for what follows: a scene-by-scene replay of McCarthy’s work. Rakoff recapitulates The Group’s plot and characters with painstaking, near-compulsive devotion. McCarthy tracks the fortunes of eight women after they graduate from Vassar in ’33. All are from well-heeled families,

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    His Back Pages

    For his new novel, Paul Auster recycles old characters. Are they worth bringing back?

    James Gibbons

    Paul Auster should not exist. I say this not to mimic a sentence that might easily have been plucked from one of his own hall-of-mirrors fictions, but simply to note his singular position in contemporary American letters. He has enjoyed unlikely success by writing reflexive novels that take up notions of chance and fate, memory and oblivion, luck and the uncanny; given his self-referential leanings and taste for highbrow allusion, it might seem that he would at best have found a coterie of admirers

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    Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

    A development economist poses a counterhistory of free trade

    James Surowiecki

    In the 1980s, as developing countries across the world struggled with crushing debt burdens and slow-growing economies, they were pushed—by the United States and international financial institutions—to embrace a set of policies that promised to rescue them. These policies, which are often grouped under the label neoliberalism, proceeded from the assumption that developing countries interfered too much with the workings of their markets. Instead, countries needed to lower tariffs and embrace

  • The Bun Field by Amanda Vähämäki

    Timothy Hodler

    The Bun Field begins with a typical comic-strip scenario: An adolescent girl lies in bed, dreaming of talking ducks and dinosaurs. This Slumberland scene displays little Winsor McCay–like polish, though; the Disneyesque ducks are rendered with childlike simplicity, and the dinosaur is as crudely penciled as a drawing taped to a kindergarten wall. The child smiles and winces in her sleep and then, at the sound of nuts being cracked, awakens to a daylight world scarcely less surreal than the one she just left behind. In her debut graphic novella, Finnish cartoonist Amanda Vähämäki proves to be a master at depicting the indeterminate menace and subtly modulating emotional

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    Ray of the Star by Laird Hunt

    James Gibbons

    When Harry Tichborne, at the outset of Laird Hunt's elegant novel Ray of the Star, crosses the Atlantic for an extended stay in an unnamed city, his journey seems an appropriate migration. In his pairing of somber themes and fanciful ambience, Hunt shares little with his American contemporaries and displays a Continental sensibility that recalls the fabulism of Cees Nooteboom (The Following Story) and the antic charms of Éric Chevillard (On the Ceiling). Written as a series of single-sentence

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    Lucretius's De rerum natura

    A new verse translation of Lucretius's De rerum natura elegantly counters the superstitions of this modern age.

    Paul Grimstad

    At a moment in history when God is said to participate in world politics, the pungent ode to nature De rerum natura, composed by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, can provide a dose of sanity. What the atomist Epicurus called ataraxia—the tranquility of mind achieved when one is freed from the fear of occult controllers—Lucretius transformed into a prophetic materialism. His lyric treatise, published in the first century bce, predicts everything from atomic physics to the existence of

  INTERVIEW

  Percival Everett

  

  Percival Everett is one of America's most imaginative and industrious contemporary fiction writers, publishing fourteen novels (and three story collections) in as many years. But his devotion to craft is matched only by his aversion to the business of publishing. This has earned Everett a cult

  • Jhumpa Lahiri

  • Jerome Charyn

  • Sing Bodies Eclectic

    A roundup of new poetry titles

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 08 Feb 2010 11:45

  A Dark Matter by Peter Straub

  Nick Antosca

  in print

  

  The incantatory and deceptive powers of storytelling have always been central to Peter Straub's novels. From the quartet of aging, dissembling raconteurs in Ghost Story (1979) to the lurid pageantry and masques of Shadowland (1980), Straub artfully layers and arranges smaller stories to construct

  • Clive Thompson on Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi Baron, Txtng: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
  • Daphne Merkin on The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives by Brian Dillon
  • Eric Banks on A Time for Everything by Karl O. Knausgard

  • Brick City – A New Media Marketing Case Study

  • Welcome to Palinland

    Katrina vanden Heuvel Though Sarah Palin's National Tea Party Convention …

  • The Breakdown: Defense Spending and the 2011 Budget

  • Herta Müller recommends Liu Xiaobo for Nobel Peace Prize

    Herta Müller has written to the Nobel Foundation calling for the …

  1:00PM

  FEB 8 2010

  Faith in the dismal science

  

  James M. Buchanan (GMU): Economists Have No Clothes; and Geoffrey Brennan (ANU) and Alan Hamlin (Manchester): Bygones are Bygones. Herbert Gintis (SFI): Towards a Renaissance of Economic Theory. From the Catholic Social Science Review, a symposium on Catholic Social Teaching and economic science. Selling short a humanistic economist: Adam Smith tartly criticized the idea that self-interest is enough. A review of After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy by Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson. Deirdre McCloskey once thought economics and rationality were the key to understanding society, but the explanatory power of rhetoric has dented her faith in the dismal science. Invasion of the European Economists:

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    Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor

    A subtle misanthropy pervades Justin Taylor's debut story collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Taylor's heroes—mostly males ranging from twitchy kids to restless thirty-somethings—are reliably uncomfortable in their own skins, embracing risk in an attempt to salvage some sense of themselves. The nameless narrator of "Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time" works in a small-town sandwich shop and offers an unnerving soliloquy about deli meat: Ham is "pink as a boiled baby and is

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    Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi Baron, Txtng: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

    The Internet hasn't killed the English language—yet

    Clive Thompson

    In the late 1870s, the advent of the telephone created a curious social question: What was the proper way to greet someone at the beginning of a call? The first telephones were always "on" and connected pairwise to each other, so you didn't need to dial a number to attract the attention of the person on the other end; you just picked up the handset and shouted something into it. But what? Alexander Graham Bell argued that "Ahoy!" was best, since it had traditionally been used for hailing ships.

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  Feb 8 2010

  Brooklyn

  Thursday, March 4 7:00pm

  • Suzan-Lori Parks

  SHELF LIFE

  Comics Relief

  Nicole Rudick

  It is a shopworn stereotype that comics shops are dank holes of nerddom, in which flabby, ponytailed men argue the finer points of Spider-Man’s relationship with Mary Jane over a game of Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering. More recently, though, there’s a new breed of shop on the scene, one that offers a selection of indie comics and graphic novels—books that have been appearing with increasing regularity in literary-minded publications. The established fact

  • Beyond the Skin Trade

    How does black nationalism stay relevant in the age of Barack Obama?

  • Woman Twirling by Jo Ann Callis

    Albert Mobilio

    Many of the figures in Jo Ann Callis’s photographs are blurred—they’ve been caught in the middle of something: A woman does the twist, skirt flying; a bare-chested fellow clutches his forehead. In these photos (like the one above, in which a young man wails or laughs—hard to say—as he thrashes backward in his chair), a piece of domestic hardware (a plant, a lamp, an electric fan) occupies the foreground like a sentinel insuring a semblance of normality in an otherwise unhinged scene. While Callis surely has a disquieting touch, one evocative of David Lynch’s stagy dreamscapes, her high-contrast prints, featuring detail that is almost stingingly sharp, temper

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    Castle by J. Robert Lennon

    Laura Stokes

    The opening lines of J. Robert Lennon’s fifth novel, Castle, describe a landscape of impenetrable wilderness, an image that comes to pervade the book. The narrator, a plainspoken man named Eric Loesch, has just returned to his hometown and purchased a large tract of undeveloped forest on the “far western edge of the county,” with only a dilapidated farmhouse at its edge. Loesch has almost no family and few friends and seems determined to avoid any connection to his old life in the area. “

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    All Aboard by Joe Ashby Porter

    Lenora Todaro

    Joe Ashby Porter has a knack for finding life’s small moments, gilding them with flights of fancy, then letting them drift away. Sometimes he writes viscerally, as in this description of a body’s decomposition: “[Grandpa] Guo dwindles to a specimen cicada husk boxed and buried near Wanda below the frost line.” And sometimes he writes opaquely, as when old lovers reconsider each other: “Resumption should be a bodily karaoke, ready (even still) to be carried away, if just as happy with

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    David R. Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

    Jesse Lichtenstein

    “Predictably—and understandably— more pressing problems than saving dirt usually carry the day,” writes David R. Montgomery. But as his new book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, details, we are losing the brown stuff far, far too quickly. Unlike maritime dead zones and radical climate change, cases in which we have little historical knowledge on which to draw, we do have some sense of what happens to civilizations that abuse and lose their dirt. The book’s conclusion takes little comfort

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    Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli

    Valerie Steiker

    Elsa Schiaparelli begins her memoir by comparing Saint Peter’s Basilica and Piazza in Rome to the claws of an enormous crab, thereby revealing the protean, anthropomorphizing imagination for which the designer was revered in 1930s Paris. Like Picasso, this short, magnetic, dark-haired Mediterranean woman captivated prewar society with her creative ferocity. A New Yorker cartoon from 1939 portrays a shopgirl showing a futuristic ball gown to a stodgily dressed older woman: “Why should Madam be

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    Roberto Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth

    Roberto Bolaño's imperturbable style

    Wayne Koestenbaum

    Roberto Bolaño died (of liver failure) in 2003 at the age of fifty; he died in Spain, exiled from his birthplace, Chile. Much remains mysterious about his life. He had bad teeth. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He was arrested by Pinochet's police. He wrote two impossibly long novels——his last, called 2666, is over one thousand pages long——and many poems; neither of the novels, and none of the poems, as far as I know, has yet appeared in English translation. He remains, for readers

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    John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression by John Brackett

    The deep grammar of John Zorn’s music is parsed in this monograph

    John Rockwell

    The composer John Zorn likes to think of himself as an outsider, wallowing in paradoxes, and he’s done a terrific job of it. The musicologist John Brackett has written what is apparently the first book-length study of the man’s music, titled John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression. He’s done not quite so terrific a job, but for anyone interested in an initial foray into the thickets of complexity and contradiction enveloping Zorn and his “poetics” (a Brackettian favorite), this is a start.

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    William Maxwell's Early Novels and Stories

    A longtime fiction editor, William Maxwell was also a writer's writer

    Peter Terzian

    The detailed chronology of William Maxwell's life included in the new Library of America edition of his first four novels and early stories is an uncannily precise mirror image of the circumstances that recur throughout his fiction. Maxwell was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois, a town, he later wrote, "small enough and sufficiently isolated for the people who lived there to have not only a marked individuality but also a stature that still seems to me larger than life-sized. They did not know

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    The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A. M. Stern edited by Kazys Varnelis

    A renowned American architect weighs in on his life and a century of design

    Terence Riley

    The Philip Johnson Tapes, edited transcripts of ten conversations conducted in 1985, provides portraits of both interviewer (Robert A. M. Stern) and interviewee (Johnson) as no less than besotted with architecture, the history thereof, and, not inappropriately, their respective roles in shaping its discourse. As someone who, beginning in the 1980s, spent many hours in conversation with both Stern and Johnson, I found that the voices captured in these transcripts sounded amazingly familiar. While

  REWRITE

  Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League by Cleo Birdwell

  Gerald Howard

  

  If you are looking for signed first editions of the canonical novels of Don DeLillo, you need to be prepared to shell out roughly $375 for White Noise, $200 for Mao II, $175 for Underworld, and $160 for Libra. In contrast, a signed first edition of the 1980 autobiography Amazons: An Intimate Memoir

  • Geoff Dyer

  • Anne Enright

  • Aleksandar Hemon

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 07 Feb 2010 16:50

  • Mary Gaitskill on Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić
  • Clay Risen on Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama by Peniel E. Joseph and We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama by Stephen Tuck
  • Caleb Crain on The Jolly Fellow
  • Hua Hsu on The Faith of Graffiti by Jon Naar, introduction by Norman Mailer, Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, and Born in the Streets: Graffiti edited by Hervé Chandès

  • Don Delillo's Point Omega.

    Don DeLillo's characters feel slightly more generic with every novel. …

  • The Best of Brit Lit

    This week: Martin Amis's latest novel causes a stir in Britain, a …

  • Wingnuts: Buy It Now

    From Sarah Palin's Tea Party antics to Glenn Beck's outrageous claims, …

  • 

    A Time for Everything by Karl O. Knausgard

    Eric Banks

    By the time Antinous Bellori encounters angels in what we can euphemistically call the flesh, the creatures are no longer those divine messengers familiar from the Old Testament. Nor have they yet mutated into the chubby, rosy-cheeked babies hoisting puffy clouds that Tiepolo et al. gloried in depicting. The eleven-year-old Antinous, lost in the darkening forest near his northern Italian home circa 1562, stumbles on a pair of the flickering fallen ones just as they're sinking their bared teeth

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    A River Dies of Thirst: Journals, If I Were Another, and Mural by Mahmoud Darwish

    Death and displacement in the lyrics of the Palestinian national poet

    Eric Ormsby

    In "Fame," one of the prose poems from A River Dies of Thirst, the last collection he published before his death in 2008, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted sardonically that "fame is the humiliation of a person deprived of secrets." Darwish knew fame well; he had been acclaimed from the moment his poems first appeared, in 1960, when he was only nineteen. For the rest of his life, he would be celebrated as "the Palestinian national poet" and "the voice of his people." One of the ironies,

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  San Francisco

  Thursday, March 4 7:30pm

  You Do the Bath

  Katherine Ashenburg

  The conjunction of warm water and flesh, the flesh being one’s own or that of others, inevitably has at least a splash of the erotic. After all, when we call an encounter or relationship steamy, it harks back to the ancient connection between the bathhouse and sex. Stew originally referred to the medieval bathhouse and its moist heat; by extension, via the sexual high jinks, often commercial, that took place there, the word bathhouse came to mean a house of prostitution. Even

  • Class Dismissed

    Is the sun really setting on the Anglo-Saxon elite that once ruled America, gin and tonic in hand?

  • Who doesn’t love to let their fingers do the walking through glossy catalogs?

  • 

    Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sánchez Piñol

    Thomas Israel Hopkins

    Marcus Garvey is not Marcus Garvey. That is, Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Marcus Garvey—half-Balkan servant to two well-heeled, good-for-nothing British brothers and African explorers—resembles the Jamaican black nationalist in name only. The Garvey of Pandora in the Congo is thrown into a London prison just before the Great War, accused of murdering the brothers during their Congolese adventure. His lawyer, Edward Norton, bears no relation to the Fight Club actor. The novel’s narrator, Tommy Thomson,

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    Voices Carry

    The African-American storytelling tradition is on vivid display in an anthology featuring interviews with former slaves, and their diaries, letters, and memoirs.

    Lawrence Hill

    Between the two of them, my teenage daughters have been required by their Canadian high school teachers to read—no fewer than three timesone and only one book that purports to introduce them to the African-American experience. Can you guess? It's Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. And if they were interested in a contemporary film about the abolitionist movement in Great Britain, all they had to do last year was visit a suburban cinema to watch Amazing Grace, a movie that has the temerity

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    My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian

    Jack Spicer believed his poems were dictated from the spirit world

    Erik Davis

    In the summer of 1965, the poet Robin Blaser discovered his friend Jack Spicer lying comatose in the poverty ward at San Francisco General. The forty-year-old Spicer had passed out drunk in the elevator of his North Beach flat a few days before and was wheeled in, without ID, in a torn and befouled suit. When an attending doctor suggested to Blaser that Spicer was just your typical middle-aged alcoholic, Blaser grabbed the fellow’s shirt: “You’re talking about a major poet.” This was

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    The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? by Padgett Powell

    Padgett Powell pops the question again and again

    Rick Moody

    Yes, it’s true. Padgett Powell’s new “novel” is a highly allusive prose work composed entirely of questions. Many reviewers of this book, I suspect, will attempt to admonish the questioner with further questions, wondering at the gumption of the thing. But it might be useful instead to answer some of the questions posed. In this regard I have chosen questions at random, at intervals of about twenty pages, in the hopes of giving the flavor of the whole, while, at the same time, attempting some

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    Alexander Theroux’s Laura Warholic; or The Sexual Intellectual

    Paul Maliszewski

    Alexander Theroux once declared revenge the “single most informing element of great world literature,” transcending even “love and war, with which themes . . . it has more than passing acquaintance.” Revenge, Theroux suggests, also drives authors to create. George Orwell, he points out, figured the “desire . . . to get your own back on grownups who snubbed you in childhood” to be among one’s first motivations for writing. Theroux’s novels are close cousins to Jacobean revenge

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    Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer and Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross

    The perils of high-tech data mining and war making

    Seth Hettena

    More than a century ago, inventor Nikola Tesla saw the potential of remote-controlled weapons in war. In the 1890s, he used radio waves to steer a small boat before a crowd at Madison Square Garden, but when he tried to sell the idea of a remote-fired torpedo to the United States government, the official who listened to the inventor’s proposal “burst out laughing.” Tesla died penniless, a man ahead of his time. By World War I, the idea no longer seemed funny. Germany used Tesla’s invention

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    BOOK OF REVELATION

    Rob Spillman

    The premise of Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, is simple: In a ruined, postapocalyptic future, a nameless father and his young son—"each the other's world entire"—trudge down a road toward the ocean, with the hope of finding a warmer, more hospitable locale. Along the way, they scrounge for cans of food in cities and countryside already thoroughly pillaged by other refugees. Death from starvation and exposure hovers, but a more immediate terror is the constant threat of dismemberment

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    Gillian Riley’s The Oxford Companion to Italian Food

    A new encyclopedia waters the mouth and sates the mind

    Melanie Rehak

    Tucked in among the many gems—culinary, historical, literary, religious, and otherwise—stashed throughout Gillian Riley’s new Oxford Companion to Italian Food is “The Pope’s Kitchen,” a luscious, whimsical sonnet by the nineteenth-century Roman poet Gioachino Giuseppe Belli, which I cannot bear to include here in anything but its entirety: The cook wanted to show me, this morning, all the stuff he bought for the most holy kitchen. Kitchen? Some kitchen! You’d think

  Andrew O'Hagan

  

  Glaswegian-turned-Londoner Andrew O'Hagan made a name for himself as the deputy editor of the London Review of Books before publishing his nonfiction debut, The Missing, in 1995. In this profound inquiry into the worlds of the vanished— runaways, abductees, murder victims—O'Hagan wove together

  • Red Wine and Blue

    Americans have a long and contradictory history of imbibing and proscribing.

  • Percival Everett

  • William T. Vollmann

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 06 Feb 2010 23:08

  • Scott McLemee on A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997 by Cornelius Castoriadis
  • Eric Banks on A Time for Everything by Karl O. Knausgard
  • Ben Schwartz on Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind and Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel by Nick Dawson

  • "The Whale": 500 days of blubber

    A new book probes the romantic appeal — and surprisingly kinky sex …

  • The Great E-book War

    Books were pulled from Amazon this week in a dispute with publishers …

  • Ralph Ellison's Endless Blues

    Why did the acclaimed author of the classic Invisible Man never publish …

  • Tibet's Star Activist Warns Obama

    As the president prepares to meet with the Dalai Lama, Tibetan activist …

  • On Super Bowl Sunday, a Focus on the Fetus

    Katha PollittThe trouble with protesting the Tim Tebow ad: all most …

  • Lawrence Lessig If we want change, we have to change Congress.

  • 

    The American Atom

    Garry Wills pins down the origins of the imperial presidency in the dark recesses of the Manhattan Project—and explains it all to Rick Perlstein

    Rick Perlstein

    One day last November, I spent the morning at Garry Wills's elegant brick home along the main street of Evanston, Illinois, pondering the Promethean scale of presidential power in the atomic age. Wills's startling new book, Bomb Power (Penguin Press, $28), argues that the prototype of the modern president is not Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. It's General Leslie Groves—the administrator of the Manhattan Project, which Wills says was the inadvertent template for

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    Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon

    The art of correspondence from Keats to Burroughs

    Adam Kirsch

    Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever: People and Their Letters is not the history of letter writing its subtitle seems to promise. Instead, it is an amiable, very readable collection of brief essays about dozens of correspondents, almost all of whom were not just "people" but professional writers. Mark Twain and Colette, Bruno Schulz and Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs and H. L. Mencken: These are not individuals you would want at the same dinner party, but they would all grudgingly admit to belonging

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    Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular edited by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh

    Harry Smith's fragmented art eludes his earnest interpreters

    Alexander Provan

    When the filmmaker, painter, ethnographer, occultist, and occasional vagrant Harry Smith died in New York's Chelsea Hotel in 1991, he left behind 166 boxes of belongings. They contained such treasures as Chinese papier-mâché masks, an illustrated manuscript on string figures (which he noted were "produced by all primitive societies" and "the only universal thing other than singing"), and countless sets of collectible cards, among them Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards, the Aleister Crowley

  • 

    Hua Hsu on The Faith of Graffiti by Jon Naar, introduction by Norman Mailer, Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, and Born in the Streets: Graffiti edited by Hervé Chandès

    Hua Hsu

    As a major serving in the British military during World War II, Jon Naar witnessed a way of life reduced to rubble. In the winter of 1973, as a fifty-something photojournalist living and working in New York, Naar once again saw a devastated landscape. But here the names of the young and dispossessed—often no more than a handle and maybe a number corresponding to the street the kid lived on, like Junior 161 or Stay High 149—were being spray-painted everywhere: bus shelters, handball courts,

  Feb 7 2010

  New York

  Thursday, March 4 7:00pm

  Page Slaves

  Leslie Savan

  

  Every time I flip through an L. L. Bean or The Company Store catalog and start to surrender to a world demanding no more of me than to juggle price, size, and color, a scene from Seinfeld comes to mind. Elaine is lying on her bed, thumbing through a Hammacher Schlemmer–y catalog, and considers

  • Grace Notes

    Alex Ross’s library includes scores, writings by composers—and thirteen recordings of Salome.

  • Uncommon Readers

    John Freeman and Nicole Aragi’s combined library is the happy merging of bookishness as vocation and avocation.

  • 

    Normal People Don't Live like This by Dylan Landis

    Eryn Loeb

    An adult character in Normal People Don't Live like This, Dylan Landis's lean, beguiling novel in stories, is a synesthete. "It means the senses work in pairs," she explains to Leah Levinson, the teenager at the center of the book. "It's a gift." Leah can appreciate this—for her, objects and words have their own dreamy weight—but her sensitivity is a product of adolescence, not neurology. Teenage girls make for compelling fictional subjects, and portraying them honestly requires a certain

  • 

    Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York by Donna Dennis

    Mark Caldwell

    New York’s Civil War– era underworlds aren’t what they used to be. Denounced in their own time by antivice crusaders as being so immoral that decency forbade even vague description, they’ve resurfaced with a vengeance in a remarkable succession of recent books that prowl in minute detail through the inventive urban libertinism of the 1850s and beyond. From these accounts, we know where the brothels were, who ran them, and how a typical evening progressed, from the parlor entertainment

  • Key Words

    BEGINNING MAY 30, the 2nd edition of the International Forum on the Novel will be held in Lyons, France, sponsored by the Villa Gillet and the Parisian review Le Monde des Livres. At twelve roundtables, some forty-seven writers from around the world will discuss various aspects of the novel, from the role of autobiography to film adaptation. To mark the occasion, the Villa Gillet elicited from participants a set of key words—words they found particularly suited to their ways of thinking about the novel. A selection of these short essays is presented below. Geneviève Brisac(HOLY) RUSSIA: my wellspring! The modern novel owes her everything. My music owes her everything.

  • 

    Zakes Mda’s Cion

    Zakes Mda explores the small-town world of a mixed-race family

    Lorraine Adams

    The fictional universe of Zakes Mda is no place for the cold rationalist. In six novels, the fifty-eight-yearold writer whom the New York Times recently hailed as “one of the most prominent black novelists in South African history” has demonstrated an abiding attachment to the seemingly ludicrous. In fact, his love of the improbable is so pervasive that some readers have mistaken it for an embrace of superstition. Novelist Norman Rush, perhaps his fiercest critic, castigated him in the New York

  • 

    The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America by William Kleinknecht

    Chris Lehmann

    It seems fitting that Ronald Reagan’s ninety-eighth birthday, on February 6, coincided with the Senate Republican effort to stonewall President Obama’s economic-stimulus plan. Doomed to failure in a key cloture vote after a trio of moderates pledged support for a compromise plan, GOP senators nevertheless thronged to deliver droning denunciations of the package before the c-span cameras. Government spending couldn’t alleviate the downturn in the economy, they intoned, since, after all, the

  • 

    The Passive Vampire by Ghérasim Luca

    Irene Gammel

    What secret was trying to pierce through this hallucinatory and hermetic language?” asks poet Ghérasim Luca in his long-lost classic The Passive Vampire. The book, first published in French in 1945 by Les Éditions de l’Oubli in Bucharest, is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy

  • 

    Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds

    Matt Madden

    In the graphic novel Exit Wounds, Israeli taxi driver Koby Franco finds himself on a reluctant quest to discover the fate of his estranged father after being contacted by a young female soldier who believes the elder Franco has died in a suicide bombing. Nothing is quite as it seems in this offbeat romantic comedy from Rutu Modan, one of the best artists to emerge from the vibrant Tel Aviv cartooning scene of the past decade. The story of her first booklength work moves along at a brisk clip,

  • 

    The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else by Christopher R. Beha

    Philip Womack

    One day, walking back to the office after a bibulous lunch, Christopher Beha sees Benjamin Franklin walking beside him: “Eat not to dullness,” Franklin told me. “Drink not to elevation.” “Shut up, Ben,” I answered. Beha was not hallucinating but imagining: This was the first of many brushes with the past resulting from an experiment that was to inform his life for a whole year—and beyond. That is, a constant and continual dialogue with some of the greatest

  INTERVIEW

  A conversation with David Rhodes

  

  David Rhodes was still a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1971 when Atlantic–Little, Brown editor Joseph Kanon bought his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, a fantastical, dark tale of two Iowa cities, launching a prolific literary career. Two more novels appeared in quick succession:

  • A conversation with Stephen Shore

  • A conversation with Gore Vidal

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 06 Feb 2010 05:57

  • Adam Kirsch on Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon
  • Clay Risen on Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama by Peniel E. Joseph and We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama by Stephen Tuck

  • Jenny Sanford Spills

    The Daily Beast speed read the Jenny Sanford's new memoir, Staying …

  • Video: Let All Super Bowl Ads Advocate

  • Tehran's Fajr Film Festival haemorrhages jurors

  • Spirited Debate

    My brother-in-law bought a liquor store because, you know, Jews have …

  • Card Snark

    Misconstrued cards. Flowers that are just going to die. Oh boy, it's …

  FEB 5 2010

  The future of the magazine

  

  ASME and MPA presents “Covering the Decade”, a fast-paced video that tells the story of the century’s first decade through the prism of magazine covers. From Blog Magazine, a look at the best good magazine news of 2009. From Folio2009: The Year in Magazines and here are 115 magazine and media predictions for 2010 (and more). Susan Krashinsky on the future of the magazine. Readers aren't ditching magazines — advertisers are ditching magazines. Judy Bachrach on how the economy is killing off magazines. Virginia Heffernan on the existential crisis of magazines online. Buy this digital magazine or we'll kill this virtual dog, or: How electronic distribution is ripping up the magazine business. The Tablet Hype: They can't possibly

  • 
  • 

    Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi Baron, Txtng: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

    The Internet hasn't killed the English language—yet

    Clive Thompson

    In the late 1870s, the advent of the telephone created a curious social question: What was the proper way to greet someone at the beginning of a call? The first telephones were always "on" and connected pairwise to each other, so you didn't need to dial a number to attract the attention of the person on the other end; you just picked up the handset and shouted something into it. But what? Alexander Graham Bell argued that "Ahoy!" was best, since it had traditionally been used for hailing ships.

  • 

  Feb 6 2010

  Brooklyn

  LUXURY & DEGRADATION

  Class Dismissed

  Jessica Joffe

  

  In a country built on growth and transformation, on the appetite for more, the ambition to preserve things as they were is peculiar to the modern Wasp. All we ask is to maintain. For those of us who came of age in the last two (exceedingly vapid) decades of the twentieth century, in places like

  • Comics Relief

    Rocketship in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, is a destination for anyone serious about comics.

  • 

    A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, A World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played by Marshall Jon Fisher

    Mark Lamster

    Tennis may be a joy to play and a pleasure to watch, but it’s not a sport that lends itself easily to literary endeavor. The average tennis match has a few hundred largely indistinguishable points, and the scoring system reads like something out of a high school calculus book. An entire library devoted to the sport might be reduced a handful of volumes and one classic work of nonfiction, John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, published forty years ago. That book is constructed around a single match,

  • 

    Elias Khoury’s Yalo

    Drake Stutesman

    In Yalo, published in Arabic in 2002, Elias Khoury combs the world of an imprisoned rapist during the violent forced con­fession of his crimes and of “the story of his life.” Yalo is a young man from Beirut’s Syriac Quarter who left the area as a teenager when the civil war escalated in 1976. He fought, then emigrated to France, where eventually, holding a Kalashnikov, he attacked lovers in parked cars at night. He returned to Lebanon and continued robbing and raping. The novel opens as

  • 

    Unplugging Philco by Jim Knipfel

    Jed Lipinski

    Jim Knipfel is perhaps best known for his first book, Slackjaw (1999), an improbably hilarious account of his affliction with paranoia, depression, and retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that left him legally blind by his thirties. He has since written two more memoirs: a chronicle of his stay at a psychiatric clinic and a skeptical meditation on spirituality as a cure for suffering. Knipfel’s hardships, and the fierce wit he has developed to endure them, would seem to make him uniquely

  • 

    Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

    Amitav Ghosh’s novel illuminates the British Empire’s polyglot opium trade

    Maya Jaggi

    The Indian Ocean, with its ancient patterns of trade and empire, has buoyed Amitav Ghosh’s writing for twenty years. The Shadow Lines (1988), his second novel, examines the partition of Bengal, while his anthropological travelogue In an Antique Land (1992) probes age-old ties between India and Egypt. The best-selling novel The Glass Palace (2000) is set between Burma and India circa the Second World War, and The Hungry Tide (2004) explores the mangrove forests and marginal peoples of the Sundarbans

  • 

    Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille

    Jason Weiss

    In May 1982, the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar and his third wife, Carol Dunlop, embarked on a curious expedition. With their trusty VW camper van, dubbed Fafner after Wagner’s dragon, they set out to drive from Paris to Marseille, intending to discover the other thruway, the parallel path hidden in plain sight, along the autoroute. The better to gain access to that imagined place, the couple established some rules: They would not once leave the highway; they would explore each rest stop,

  • 

    Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee by Bee Wilson and Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen

    Two books take stock of the never-ending food crisis

    Phoebe Connelly

    To read about food is, increasingly, to read about crisis. There are the main-course-and-divorce memoirs of a Betty Fussell, the restaurant tell-alls of an Anthony Bourdain, and—most alarmingly—the tainted-food jeremiads, such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, decrying how global agribusiness is environmentally unsustainable and bad for our health. Producing a mood of crisis about our sustenance is apparently supposed to heighten our determination

  • 

    Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic by Irene Gammel

    Melanie Rehak

    When asked why she had decided to give red hair to her famous heroine, Anne Shirley (better known as Anne of Green Gables to legions of little girls the world over), author Maud Montgomery replied, “I didn’t. It was red.” The question of whether Anne, the passionate orphan with a temper and a penchant for puffy sleeves, really sprang fully formed from her creator’s head—Athena to Montgomery’s Zeus—is the driving force behind Irene Gammel’s new book, Looking for Anne of Green Gables, published in

  • 

    The Virgin Formica by Sharon Mesmer

    Quinn Latimer

    “Thank you for asking me to submit to your magazine, / Dead Fluffy Coyote, / but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’. / Or, I should say, rockin’ again.” In the swaggering opening lines of The Virgin Formica, Sharon Mesmer lays out its central conceit: that poetry is the least of her concerns––she’s been livin’ and will continue to do so, regardless of what the academic peanut gallery has to say about it. Often flowing down the page in lanky, listlike columns, her

  • 

    What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect edited by Joann Moser

    Inspired by a low-key dadaism, California artist William T. Wiley has been making densely allusive, humorously inflected paintings, sculptures, and films for fifty years. The vividly cartoonish, Rube Goldberg–like imagery in Wiley’s creations serves a very literary sensibility—his paintings, prints, and watercolors tell stories and employ wordplay. A series of drawings and watercolors from the early ’80s addresses environmental topics like acid rain and Three Mile Island, as well as

  REWRITE

  On Drink by Kingsley Amis

  Alexander Waugh

  

  Photographs of the novelist Kingsley Amis, taken between his fiftieth birthday in April 1972 and his death in October 1995, sometimes show a resplendent sheen on his forehead, nose, and cheeks. This is what some people call "sweat alcohol," a common problem among heavy drinkers of shorts and beer.

  • Sing Bodies Eclectic

    A roundup of new poetry titles

  • Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 05 Feb 2010 03:10

  Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett

  Scott Indrisek

  web exclusive

  

  The economy and its discontents can be an anemic topic for literary fiction, and Adam Haslett struggles with this challenge in his debut novel about banking disaster, Union Atlantic. The disaster in question involves "rogue trading" in Japan that threatens to annihilate an entire Boston-based financial

  • The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino

  • Wild Child by T.C. Boyle

  • Mary Gaitskill on Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić
  • Caleb Crain on The Jolly Fellow
  • Martha Bayne on Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon

  • "Voodoo Histories": When smart people believe dumb things

    From 9/11 to the moon landing, how conspiracy theories have changed …

  • Why is braille dying?

    In an age of audiobooks, only 10 percent of blind kids learn it. But …

  • "Checklist Manifesto": Healthcare reform rock star

    Talking medicine, checklists and alternative music with New Yorker …

  • America Can Fix Its Broken Politics  

    As last Friday's discussion between Obama and Republicans showed, our …

  • Wingnuts: Buy It Now

    From Sarah Palin's Tea Party antics to Glenn Beck's outrageous claims, …

  • Andrew Young's Revenge

    Say this for John Edwards and Andrew Young, the author of a chilling …

  • Atheism's Soulful Philosopher

    Rebecca Goldstein's new novel aims to bridge the divide between believers …

  • How to Get Our Democracy Back

    Lawrence LessigIf we want change, we have to change Congress.

  • Focus on the Fetus

    Katha Pollitt The trouble with protesting the Tim Tebow ad: all most …

  • Swing Time: On Morris Dickstein

    D.D. Guttenplan Morris Dickstein's elegant cultural history of the …

  • Protests in Iran

  • In OpenDemocracy, Salome Zourabichvili mourns for the wilted petals of …

  • In Defense of Elizabeth Gilbert

    Everybody trashes Elizabeth Gilbert. Me, I kind of like the idea of …

  • Fleshed Out

    It is hard to know oneself. Which is why Bronzino's ''Standing Nude'' …

  • Name Recognition

    Can you help a baby mama? I need a name! By Kristen Hoggatt

  FEB 4 2010

  Skepticism is as old as faith

  

  Richard van Oort (Victoria): Doubt, Compromise, and Doublethink: Transcendence in a Secular Age. From Cross Currents, an article on why the New Atheism is (partially) good for true spirituality and religion. A The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker. From TLS, a The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible Is Scientifically Accurate by Andrew Parker. An interview with John Coats, author of Original Sinners: A New Interpretation of Genesis. Often sadistic, scatological and pornographic, the Bible is no innocent bedtime story. From Fortean Times, an article on tracing the Eucharist's source: Christian rite or pagan festival? A review of The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion by J. L. Schellenberg. A postsecular world

  • 

    Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular edited by Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh

    Harry Smith's fragmented art eludes his earnest interpreters

    Alexander Provan

    When the filmmaker, painter, ethnographer, occultist, and occasional vagrant Harry Smith died in New York's Chelsea Hotel in 1991, he left behind 166 boxes of belongings. They contained such treasures as Chinese papier-mâché masks, an illustrated manuscript on string figures (which he noted were "produced by all primitive societies" and "the only universal thing other than singing"), and countless sets of collectible cards, among them Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards, the Aleister Crowley

  • 

    Dubravka Ugrešić finds feminist mettle in an Eastern European witch

    impudently here. The author not only invites the term; in this strange and wonderful book, she owns it. Divided into three parts, the book begins with a mundane tale about a difficult mother-daughter relationship and gradually hints at

  • 

    The American Atom

    Garry Wills pins down the origins of the imperial presidency in the dark recesses of the Manhattan Project—and explains it all to Rick Perlstein

    Rick Perlstein

    One day last November, I spent the morning at Garry Wills's elegant brick home along the main street of Evanston, Illinois, pondering the Promethean scale of presidential power in the atomic age. Wills's startling new book, Bomb Power (Penguin Press, $28), argues that the prototype of the modern president is not Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. It's General Leslie Groves—the administrator of the Manhattan Project, which Wills says was the inadvertent template for

  • 

    Brian Dillon explores the painful world of imaginary illness

    Daphne Merkin

    The fact of our embodiment is something we all face with greater or lesser anxiety. We navigate the world as both thinking minds and reacting bodies, with room enough for heady distortion between them. The body, in its declared state of health or illness, can be used to bolster our psychological defenses; a slew of diagnoses can be called on to explain why we're not functioning as we think we should be. That said, though interested in all the mentally agitated, I have never felt particularly

  Feb 5 2010

  Tucson

  Friday, March 5 7:00pm

  • Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret - A talk and reading by Steve Luxenberg

  • WORD running group

  • ANTONINO D’AMBROSIO – A HEARTBEAT AND A GUITAR: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears A Heartbeat and a Guitar by Antonino D'Ambrosio: Book Cover

  • KRISTA TIPPETT in conversation with Paul Holdengraber

  • Gina Ochsner

  • PETER HEDGES – THE HEIGHTS

  • SIMON VAN BOOY – THE SECRET LIVES OF PEOPLE IN LOVE

  • The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

  • Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

  • HELEN SIMONSON – MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND

  • Let's Get Handy! Klutz Crafting Hour for Kids

  • David Kirby Animal Factory

  • Tony Dushane reading from Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk

  • African American Writers Alliance Group Reading

  • • Denver

    • Highlands Ranch

    • Tucson

  Feb 3 2010

  Sheila Heti: Secret Self-Help

  

  When we talk about books, we hardly every talk about how they help. It is unfashionable: Browsing the self-help section of a bookstore seems as shameful as picking up a porn magazine at 7-Eleven. Interviewers seldom ask authors, "How is your book meant to help people?" (Instead, they ask the impossible, "What does it mean?") Yet authors write with the hope of helping readers and themselves—by

  LAST THINGS

  Beyond the Skin Trade

  Victor Lavalle

  When I was a boy, I prayed for straight hair. You have to understand, I grew up on heavy metal. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to start. Then Anthrax and Exodus, Megadeth and Metallica. My friends and I gathered in living rooms and basements and empty lots and banged our heads to “Damage, Inc.” and “I Am the Law.” If you nearly snapped your neck, you were doing something right. We were a pretty wild mix: a Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys, and me—the only

  • Little Ideological Annie

    How a cartoon gamine midwifed the graphic novel—and the modern conservative movement.

  • Drawing Circles

    How Frank Miller's cult comic 300 was transformed into a box-office blockbuster.

  • 

    Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small

    Carla Blumenkranz

    Anne Fadiman is a specialist in what she stubbornly calls the familiar essay, a genre that reached its prime in the early nineteenth century. Most readers and writers today are acquainted with its cousin, the personal essay. Fadiman’s word choice, then, acts as a small protest. Personal, she notes in the preface to At Large and At Small, has increasingly come to mean “confessional,” and Fadiman is not one for theatrics. Critical doesn’t quite do it either, because so often what she writes

  • On the Record

    Albert Mobilio

    When did what writers say in interviews become at least as important as what they actually write? If readers once pried at their paragraphs looking for revelations, they are now more likely to graze their quips in some magazine—"Twenty Questions" in the New York Times Magazine. Gertrude Stein—herself no mean quipster—rebuked Ernest Hemingway by saying, "Remarks are not literature," but like many such bons mots, hers doesn't quite hold up. The author interview, which has truly come into its own in the last century (in antebellum America, newspaper interviews were reserved chiefly for convicted criminals), might be best thought of as a literary genre, with its tone,

  • 

    Essex County by Jeff Lemire

    Jeet Heer

    The noses Jeff Lemire draws don’t just sit in the middle of his characters’ faces, they loom so large as to be unavoidable. These landmarks serve as emblems of both personality and family history. Some possess a beaklike sharpness (aligning their characters with the crows that make regular appearances in these books), while others are as blocky as ice cubes—not surprising, given that Lemire’s stories are set in Southern Ontario and feature men and boys who love hockey. Cartooning at its

  • 

    Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

    Natasha Randall

    “Length is measured by the speed of a moving shadow. Is seaweed beautiful? A change in a narrative’s temporal modality rids us of our Cartesian arrogance—it’s autumn now, but back then it was spring. Is it possible to say that seaweed is much more beautiful than the dryness in your mouth?” These are lines from the first paragraphs of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Dust, a book of essays that is certain to rid its readers of any Cartesian arrogance when it comes to narrative. Dragomoshchenko’s prose

  • 

    The Women by T. C. Boyle

    Sarah L. Courteau

    T. C. Boyle is getting in touch with his feminine side. His last novel, Talk Talk (2006), was his first to feature a woman in a leading role. The Women, which clearly announces his intention to again focus on the fairer sex, is a lushly complex saga of the wives and lovers who trailed, like geese flying in formation, behind Frank Lloyd Wright. The fabled architect makes a tempting subject for fiction. Early last century, when the long nose of the law reached into people’s bedrooms, his personal

  • 

    The Shanghai Gesture by Gary Indiana

    Gary Indiana’s carnivalesque novel is both hallucinatory and riotous

    James Gibbons

    Gary Indiana likes rummaging through the wreckage. He regularly signals as much: Recent essays were gathered last year in a collection titled Utopia’s Debris, and his 2003 novel, Do Everything in the Dark, opens with a section called “The Debris Field.” Later in that book, he coins an aperçu that encapsulates an entire philosophy: “Wherever people attempt life, debris piles up.” The emphasis on detritus suggests that everyone and everything has washed up as flotsam and jetsam on history’s

  • 

    Afterwords

    Eight years later, many novels have been written about September 11. What can they tell us about that day?

    Laura Frost

    I didn't see the bodies falling. At least I think I didn't. In that moment of panic, when death seemed entirely possible, there in my living room, two blocks from the World Trade Center, too close to figure out what was happening beyond the swirling paper and the glass shards, debating whether to run or to stay inside, I might have seen more—or less—than I remember. Many weeks later, near where the National Guard barricade had been at the end of the street, I'm pretty sure I saw vendors

  • 

    Knut Hamsun's HungerGrowth of the Soil

    Knut Hamsun was one of the master spirits of modern literature

    Sven Birkerts

    Twenty-seven years separate the publication of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, in 1890, and that of his mature masterwork, Growth of the Soil, in 1917. Hunger, his first novel (he was thirty-one), captured the manic pitch of his long years of living on the brink, in his native Norway as well as in America, where he worked as a manual laborer, served as a streetcar conductor, and, as the well-known story goes, rode halfway across the country on top of a locomotive gulping air in an attempt to cure himself

  • 

    Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson

    Antonya Nelson’s characters hail from places like Houston and Wichita

    David Gates

    In the title story of Antonya Nelson’s latest collection, Nothing Right, a divorced mother asks her teenage son—who’d once loved to be read to and now balks at writing a paper on Macbeth—why he dislikes literature. “It’s not real,” he says. “Just a bunch of imaginary crap.” Sure, you could give the kid an argument about Shakespeare, and so could the mother if she, like a lot of Nelson’s characters, weren’t worn down by parenthood. She recognizes, as he does not, that something

    … MORE

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  

  Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie never expected to reach a US audience with her second novel, the 2007 Orange Prize–winning Half of a Yellow Sun (just released in paperback by Anchor). The novel depicts the lives of a thirteen-year-old houseboy who serves and is educated by a revolutionary

  • Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League by Cleo Birdwell

  • Sweet Truth

    Appreciations of ice cream and cake celebrate the deliciously fattening over the guiltily consumed fake.

  • Percival Everett

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 02 Feb 2010 05:26

  in print

  

  impudently here. The author not only

  • Hua Hsu on The Faith of Graffiti by Jon Naar, introduction by Norman Mailer, Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, and Born in the Streets: Graffiti edited by Hervé Chandès
  • Eric Ormsby on A River Dies of Thirst: Journals, If I Were Another, and Mural by Mahmoud Darwish
  • Katherine Dunn on Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson by Wil Haygood

  • Amy Bloom's Where the God of Love Hangs Out.

    One by one, they march across the proscenium of Amy Bloom's new story …

  • Give Up on Mr. Perfect

    In her provocative new book, Lori Gottlieb says women should just settle …

  • `England Is a Cesspit'

    So says disgusted Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka about the country's policy …

  • Blackwater's Youngest Victim

    Jeremy Scahill Nine-year-old Ali Kinani died from a gunshot wound to …

  • In OpenDemocracy, Salome Surabishwili mourns for the wilted petals of …

  FEB 1 2010

  Iran returns to the headlines

  

  Jahangir Amuzegar (MEPC): Iran's Oil as a Blessing and a Curse (reg. req.). Damon Golriz (The Hague): Investment in Social Sciences: Key to a Democratic Iran. A The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran by Homa Katouzian. A review of A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy. The current turmoil is Iran is not a result of the alleged election fraud, but of thirty years of brutality frustration. Hooman Majd on Iran's Green Movement: It's a civil rights movement, not a revolution. Miller-McCune goes inside the cyberwar for Iran's future. Abbas Milani on Iran's people, Iran's pulpits. A series of political defections and a new poll proves that Ahmadinejad is losing support among the conservatives who once made

  • 

    A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997 by Cornelius Castoriadis

    The annals of an antinomian socialist

    Scott McLemee

    In the summer of 1967, subscribers to the obscure far-left theoretical journal Socialisme ou Barbarie received notice that it was suspending publication and that its sponsoring organization, familiarly called SOUB, had dissolved. This cannot have come as too great a shock. Two years had passed since the last issue. But the shuttering of SOUB marked the end of an important collective project within the anti-Stalinist left, one whose influence was felt well beyond France. SOUB had started life in

  • 
  • 

    Is Don DeLillo's endgame of consciousness played out?

    Don DeLillo's is a hard book to critique because it is chock-full of brilliance and ought to be supported simply because we need books that allow humanity to think about the condition of being human. But, in fact, Point Omega's excess of thought and brilliance is its biggest problem. Slight though it may be, the book totters under the burden of its complexity. At its arid heart is Richard Elster, "a defense intellectual" who, even before our government started its unconstitutional

  • 
  • 

    Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World by Naomi Baron, Txtng: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

    The Internet hasn't killed the English language—yet

    Clive Thompson

    In the late 1870s, the advent of the telephone created a curious social question: What was the proper way to greet someone at the beginning of a call? The first telephones were always "on" and connected pairwise to each other, so you didn't need to dial a number to attract the attention of the person on the other end; you just picked up the handset and shouted something into it. But what? Alexander Graham Bell argued that "Ahoy!" was best, since it had traditionally been used for hailing ships.

  Feb 2 2010

  • Daisy Martinez Daisy: Morning, Noon and Night

  • Berkeley

  Paranoid Allusion

  The idea of indie auteur Gus Van Sant filming a young-adult novel might seem odd at first, but a closer look suggests more than a little destiny at play in the director's latest, Paranoid Park, adapted from Blake Nelson's 2006 novel of the same name. The film, which advances the dreamy, elliptical style of Van Sant's recent work by adding noirish elements to it, opens with a haunting image of Portland, Oregon's St. Johns Bridge, set to the eerie strains of Nino Rota's score

  • Enumeration Sensation

    Ecstasis, calm, vertigo of the infinite . . . many, many feelings find expression in lists.

  • Books 360

    To research his new mid-1800s novel, Heyday, Kurt Andersen turned to the contents of his library, a collection as multifaceted as its owner.

  • 

    Beasts! Book OneBeasts! Book Two edited by Jacob Covey

    Nicole Rudick

    “O LORD, WHAT A VARIETY OF THINGS YOU HAVE MADE! In wisdom you have made them all.” We know He made the lamb and the tiger, but what about the yeti, the kraken, and the manticore? Not to mention the Invunche, a “twisted, deformed, pathetic creature” that started out as “an innocent Chilean boy who is sold to a warlock.” Then there’s the flesh-eating Burmese Khimakha, an ogre so hideous that he’s ugly “even by ogre standards.” Oh, and Mothman: It looks like a human, except that

  • 

    John Ashbery's Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

    John Ashbery's art reveals the logic of the illogical

    Marjorie Perloff

    John Ashbery's 1985 Selected Poems drew on the first thirty years of his career, from 1956's Some Trees to 1985's A Wave. The new Selected spans the twenty years following '85 in roughly the same number of pages. Indeed, the volumes have a nice symmetry: Each covers ten books of poems (the most recent, A Worldly Country [2007], is not included in the new collection); each of the books in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems is reduced to approximately one-third of its length. Ashbery's

  • 

    Peter Cole's The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950 - 1492

    A new anthology highlights the fusion of Jewish and Islamic cultures

    Marjorie Perloff

    In the middle of the tenth century, a young Moroccan Jewish poet named Dunash ben Labrat arrived in the Andalusian city of Cordoba, then ruled by the blue-eyed caliph of Spanish-Basque descent 'Abd al-Rahmaan III. Dunash had studied in Baghdad, then considered the most spectacular city in the world, with the head of the Babylonian Jewish academy of Sura, Sa'adia ben Yosef al-Fayuumi, a man of great learning, who taught him, among other things, a keen appreciation of Arabic and its notion of

  • 

    Marina Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields

    Lisa Shea on Marina Lewycka’s Strawberry Fields

    Lisa Shea

    When nineteen-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl Irina Blazhko arrives in the English countryside to begin life as a farmworker in Marina Lewycka’s new novel, Strawberry Fields, she first notices “the dazzling salty light dancing on the sunny field, the ripening strawberries, the little rounded trailer perched up on the hill and the oblong boxy trailer down in the corner of the field, the woods beyond, and the long, curving horizon” and dreamily thinks to herself, “So this is England.” Never

  • 

    Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!

    Fletcher Hanks’s bleak comics vision is rediscovered

    Matt Madden

    There is a man in a blue suit and a green and red skullcap piloting a red plane across a yellow sky. Crossing a lush jungle valley, he spots thousands of “gigantic royal panthers” and instantly declares: “I CAN USE THEM IN MY PLAN TO WRECK CIVILIZATION!” Though the colorful and crudely drawn adventure comics gathered in I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! read like the fevered imaginings of Henry Darger’s bully older brother, they are, in fact, the garish and terrifying work of Fletcher

  • 

    Daniel Johnston by Jad Fair, Philippe Vergne, and Harvey Pekar

    Nicole Rudick

    In a drawing of Texas in which the state is superimposed on a cross, Austin is designated by a pentagram sunk into a vortex. A dog’s head severed from a monstrous humanoid form inaccurately observes, “CROSS ON TEXAS,” and a trepanned human head with sunken eyes interjects, “DEATH TO SUICIDE.” Such is the landscape of Daniel Johnston’s drawings—cartoonish collisions of perspective whose Magic Marker palette extends from bright to brighter. But the more than eighty works that make up

  • 

    Running by Jean Echenoz

    Matthew Ladd

    Jean Echenoz's twelfth book, his second historical novel, throws into relief the difficult and remarkable life of Emil Zátopek, a Czech long-distance runner. The story might be merely inspirational if Echenoz did not tell it so truthfully: Though Zátopek is regarded as one of the greatest runners of the twentieth century, his famously brutal training techniques and graceless form suggested an expertise almost wrenched from his body: "He knows he can rely on himself and on his love of pain,"

  • 

    Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York by Donna Dennis

    Mark Caldwell

    New York’s Civil War– era underworlds aren’t what they used to be. Denounced in their own time by antivice crusaders as being so immoral that decency forbade even vague description, they’ve resurfaced with a vengeance in a remarkable succession of recent books that prowl in minute detail through the inventive urban libertinism of the 1850s and beyond. From these accounts, we know where the brothels were, who ran them, and how a typical evening progressed, from the parlor entertainment

  • 

    Slumberland by Paul Beatty

    Paul Beatty seeks a bigger, badder African-American identity

    Alex Abramovich

    In his first year as coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson made headlines by passing important books out to his star players: Shaquille O’Neal described the author of Ecce Homo as “ahead of his time” and “digital” and began referring to himself as “the black, basketball-playing Nietzsche.” Kobe Bryant, who viewed Jackson’s gesture as a personal affront, judged the book he received—Paul Beatty’s first novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996)to be “bogus.” Well, yes. Insofar as The White Boy

  William T. Vollmann

  

  William T. Vollmann has traveled to unforgiving and turbulent places in search of insights into the human condition, conducted exhaustive research, and written epic works that commingle genres, deepen our perception of history, intensify our sense of empathy, and complicate our moral equations.

  • A.S. Byatt

  • Terry Gross, Bernard Pivot, Studs Terkel, and Michael Silverblatt

  • A conversation with Stephen Shore

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 01 Feb 2010 02:41

  A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell

  Daniel Nester

  web exclusive

  

  A Common Pornography is neither common nor, by today's standards, pornographic. It is more accurate to classify Kevin Sampsell's fragmented, moving memoir as that most storied of stories, the Bildungsroman. More precisely, for those keeping score at home with their glossary of literary terms, it is

  • Caleb Crain on The Jolly Fellow
  • Scott McLemee on A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997 by Cornelius Castoriadis
  • Rick Perlstein on The American Atom
  • Daphne Merkin on The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives by Brian Dillon

  • Wole Soyinka's British Problem

    As religious violence deepens in his home country, Nobel laureate and …

  • The Best of Brit Lit

    This week: Peter Carey's American picaresque take on Tocqueville, a …

  • The Brain and Visual Perception

  • 

    Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić

    Dubravka Ugrešić finds feminist mettle in an Eastern European witch

    Mary Gaitskill

    Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić is on the simplest level about the adventures of four old hags, plus their families and friends, adventures seen through the palimpsest narration of ur-witch Baba Yaga—the greatest hag of 'em all. I don't use the word hag impudently here. The author not only invites the term; in this strange and wonderful book, she owns it. Divided into three parts, the book begins with a mundane tale about a difficult mother-daughter relationship and gradually hints at

  • 

    Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon

    Martha Bayne

    A noun followed by a colon and a claim to greatness—whether Coal: A Human History or Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, it's a formula with proven publishing legs. As these smartly packaged microhistories train their writers' full powers of research and analysis on undervalued or overlooked topics, they can, in skilled hands, elevate humble subjects to glorious heights—and argue convincingly for their importance on the world stage. However, as deployed in Steven Solomon's

  • 

  Feb 1 2010

  Tuesday, February 23 7:30pm

  • The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

  • • New Haven

  THE MOVIEGOER

  The Change Biopics Need?

  Bilge Ebiri

  The Barack Obama era will bring us many things, including, no doubt, a major motion picture. That may at first seem counterintuitive: After all, the story itself is certainly nowhere near completion. Asked during a Frost/Nixon junket interview in December, producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard agreed it was too early to talk about an Obama biopic. But the onetime Illinois senator’s acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, remains a much-discussed potential movie

  • Drawing Circles

    How Frank Miller's cult comic 300 was transformed into a box-office blockbuster.

  • Don’t Fix It

  • 

    The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox by John Freeman

    Caitlin Roper

    We live in a culture devoted to technology, and yet most of us cannot find the time to consider its history or its consequences. John Freeman has made the time, and he has thought carefully about how we have gotten here. The average office worker sends and receives some two hundred e-mails a day. Sixty-five percent of Americans spend more time with a computer than with a spouse. Our minds are frequently distracted by a buzz, beep, or blink of light from a handheld device. Our eyesight is getting

  • 

    Talking Pictures

    Dorothea Lange's democratic art evoked her subjects' many voices

    Jordan Bear

    In July of 1964, Dorothea Lange, fatigued and distressed by the esophageal cancer that would take her life a year later, participated in a series of interviews with a San Francisco television station. Having spent half a century making photographs, including the iconic "Migrant Mother," for which she would be most remembered, Lange struggled, when asked by the reporter, to locate her own achievements within the medium's pantheon. She took the question almost literally, choosing to describe her

  • 

    Mercury Station by Mark von Schlegell

    Jeff Vandermeer

    Although science fiction is known as a “literature of ideas,” many recent novels in the genre have been stuck in a rut of fun but safe geek technophilia or retro “boy’s adventure” stories. In a way, then, Mark von Schlegell’s Mercury Station feels both fresh and dated, because it ignores most of the current scene. Instead, the novel harks back to the heyday of such New Wave giants as J. G. Ballard, as well as such glorious eccentrics as Ursula K. Le Guin, John Calvin Batchelor, and Philip K.

  • Excerpts

    Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack Kerouac

    MARK TWAIN I think interviewing as an institution is good enough where the man under torture has something to confess, and the torturer knows how to worry it out of him. SOUTH AUSTRALIAN REGISTER, OCTOBER 14, 1895 MR. T.: The fact is, I detest elevators, and I'm not ashamed to own it. R.: Then you like walking? MR. T.: Much better. I do my own walking and talking and write my own books, which is more than everyone can say. R.: You don't believe in plagiarizing then? MR. T.: No, sir; I never plagiarize—unless I can do it successfully. R.: Do I understand that you never have done it? MR. T.: No, sir; but that was probably because I wasn't successful at it. . . . R.: May

  • 

    Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment by Phil Zuckerman and Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist by Sharman Apt Russell

    Does godlessness go with the good life?

    For all the wild exertions of fundamentalist and atheist chest beaters the world over, God seems to be on hold for much of the West. As religion threatens to plunge the twenty-first century into a reprisal of the seventeenth century’s Thirty Years’ War, it is tempting to smite the thing altogether, as many intellectuals sought to during the Enlightenment. But where would that leave us, not only culturally but in terms of “truthiness”? That recently coined term reveals much about our

  • 

    A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World by Marcia Tucker

    Martha Schwendener

    You could quibble with a few things in Marcia Tucker’s posthumously published memoir, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World. For instance, it takes a bit long to get to the art-world part; one travels first through Tucker’s early life, growing up in Brooklyn and New Jersey with a beautiful, critical mother and a withdrawn, workaholic father. Given the thin boundary between fiction and fact, we’ll never really know whether a twenty-four-year-old Tucker actually called

  • 

    The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

    Celia McGee

    Princeton Architectural Press is about to release a book on Frida Kahlo that features a cache of purportedly rediscovered paintings, journals, and trinket-laced archival materials, which experts are denouncing as fake. The publication looks to do little for the reputation and life story of the complicated Mexican artist except to further cheapen them. But as a venture into the territory where fiction stalks fact, it handily illustrates the romanticized notions of history's celebrities that get

  • 

    Parcours Muséologique Revisité by Robert Polidori

    Kolby Yarnell

    When strolling in an old church or museum, it's often tempting to sneak into a roped-off section or peek behind a closed door. What, after all, could be hiding from us? Perhaps nothing more than an old broom. For the past twenty-five years, Canadian photographer Robert Polidori has been going behind the scenes at the Palace of Versailles to document periods of restoration and change. The result, nearly five hundred photographs collected in three volumes, is a far more intimate and revealing scene

  • 

    The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

    Matthew Shaer

    Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s masterful first novel, The Informers, published five years ago in Spanish and now available in a lyric translation by Anne McLean, comprises a dozen narrative strands—some laced, some tangled—that describe the same forgotten tragedy. Between 1941 and 1945, the Colombian government, under pressure from American leaders, interned and economically “blacklisted” hundreds of emigrant Germans suspected of having ties to the Axis cause. At the time, Nazi sympathizers lived

  INTERVIEW

  Andrew O'Hagan

  

  Glaswegian-turned-Londoner Andrew O'Hagan made a name for himself as the deputy editor of the London Review of Books before publishing his nonfiction debut, The Missing, in 1995. In this profound inquiry into the worlds of the vanished— runaways, abductees, murder victims—O'Hagan wove together

  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • Guiltless Gourmet

    Brillat-Savarin's classic work exhorts us to eat, drink, and most of all be merry.

  • A conversation with Aleksandar Hemon

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 31 Jan 2010 03:52

  • Aleksandar Hemon on Point Omega by Don DeLillo
  • Adam Kirsch on Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon

  • "Eternity Soup": Dying for eternal youth

    How our desperate desire to stop aging has created an industry fueled …

  • Sam Shepard Rides Again

    The iconic actor and writer is in the midst of a cultural moment with …

  • Do I Have to Read `Committed'?

  • Journalism in 10: Students on the Future of Media

  • 

    A River Dies of Thirst: Journals, If I Were Another, and Mural by Mahmoud Darwish

    Death and displacement in the lyrics of the Palestinian national poet

    Eric Ormsby

    In "Fame," one of the prose poems from A River Dies of Thirst, the last collection he published before his death in 2008, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted sardonically that "fame is the humiliation of a person deprived of secrets." Darwish knew fame well; he had been acclaimed from the moment his poems first appeared, in 1960, when he was only nineteen. For the rest of his life, he would be celebrated as "the Palestinian national poet" and "the voice of his people." One of the ironies,

  • 

    Hua Hsu on The Faith of Graffiti by Jon Naar, introduction by Norman Mailer, Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, and Born in the Streets: Graffiti edited by Hervé Chandès

    Hua Hsu

    As a major serving in the British military during World War II, Jon Naar witnessed a way of life reduced to rubble. In the winter of 1973, as a fifty-something photojournalist living and working in New York, Naar once again saw a devastated landscape. But here the names of the young and dispossessed—often no more than a handle and maybe a number corresponding to the street the kid lived on, like Junior 161 or Stay High 149—were being spray-painted everywhere: bus shelters, handball courts,

  • 

  Jan 31 2010

  Thursday, February 25 7:30pm

  • Mein Leipzig

    A German publisher and bookstore owner considers his city’s distinguished literary legacy.

  • Penn. and Paper

    David Gordon Green makes a melancholy movie out of Stewart O'Nan's metafictional novel Snow Angels.

  • 

    Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh

    Taline Voskeritchian

    A lawyer by training and a writer by necessity, Raja Shehadeh has, since the early ’80s, argued cases of Palestinian land ownership in Israeli courts and written extensively on the legal aspects of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He has also produced five volumes of prose about Palestinian life, of which Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (2001) is the best known to American readers. Part memoir, part family chronicle, the book is an emotionally fraught

  • 

    Roberto Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth

    Roberto Bolaño's imperturbable style

    Wayne Koestenbaum

    Roberto Bolaño died (of liver failure) in 2003 at the age of fifty; he died in Spain, exiled from his birthplace, Chile. Much remains mysterious about his life. He had bad teeth. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He was arrested by Pinochet's police. He wrote two impossibly long novels——his last, called 2666, is over one thousand pages long——and many poems; neither of the novels, and none of the poems, as far as I know, has yet appeared in English translation. He remains, for readers

  • 

    A Tribe of His Own

    In his biography of Ralph Ellison, Arnold Rampersand accuses the author of turning away from the reality of black life.

    Matthew Price

    In early April 1968, Ralph Ellison took part in a literary festival hosted by the University of Notre Dame, where he joined the likes of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and William F. Buckley Jr. on the program. When he took the stage on the evening of the sixth to deliver his remarks, the moment could not have been more charged. The nation was in crisis: Two days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; across the country, cities had exploded in scenes that seemed

  • Dennis Balk’s Colin De Land, American Fine Arts

    Eric Banks

    A personal aside: When Colin De Land died in 2003 at age forty-seven, Artforum titled its tribute to him “Shaggy Dogg.” It was one of the most apt titles the magazine ever came up with. First at Vox Populi, the East Village gallery he opened in the early ’80s on East Sixth Street, then at American Fine Arts, on Wooster Street and later in Chelsea, Colin’s approach turned art dealing on its head; it seemed at times to be an inside joke (just like the show he staged of the fake artist John Dogg), but could anyone other than Colin have pulled it off? The cliché is to say Colin made the gallery into its own work of Conceptual art, but clichés always contain a

  • 

    Hegel, Haiti and Universal History by Susan Buck-Morss

    Michael Roth

    In 2000, Susan Buck-Morss published an essay in the journal Critical Inquiry that positively crackled with provocations for research, scholarly imagination, and political action. It had the unlikely title “Hegel and Haiti,” and now she has expanded it into a slim book, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. It still packs a powerful punch. Its strength lies in the development of a specific claim in the history of philosophy into a general theme concerning universality and politics. The claim is

  • 

    John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression by John Brackett

    The deep grammar of John Zorn’s music is parsed in this monograph

    John Rockwell

    The composer John Zorn likes to think of himself as an outsider, wallowing in paradoxes, and he’s done a terrific job of it. The musicologist John Brackett has written what is apparently the first book-length study of the man’s music, titled John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression. He’s done not quite so terrific a job, but for anyone interested in an initial foray into the thickets of complexity and contradiction enveloping Zorn and his “poetics” (a Brackettian favorite), this is a start.

  • 

    Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh by Gerald Grant

    Catherine Tumber

    Quick: When you think of inner-city poverty, urban blight, gang violence, and steep high school dropout rates among chronically unemployed minorities, what American cities come to mind? Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Chicago, maybe Saint Louis? Yet recent studies show that smaller cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are plagued by the same problems—indeed, to a worse degree. Small-to-midsize older industrial cities didn’t experience the “comeback” secured via globalization

  • 

    John Ashbery's Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

    John Ashbery's art reveals the logic of the illogical

    Marjorie Perloff

    John Ashbery's 1985 Selected Poems drew on the first thirty years of his career, from 1956's Some Trees to 1985's A Wave. The new Selected spans the twenty years following '85 in roughly the same number of pages. Indeed, the volumes have a nice symmetry: Each covers ten books of poems (the most recent, A Worldly Country [2007], is not included in the new collection); each of the books in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems is reduced to approximately one-third of its length. Ashbery's

  • 

    A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy and The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

    Two memoirs recount the psychic and physical intricacies of illness

    Wendy Lesser

    In general, we don’t enjoy hearing about other people’s illnesses. If you say, “How are you?” to an acquaintance or a new friend, you want to get back a pat “Fine,” not some lengthy disquisition on the latest ache or pain. The exception to this rule occurs when both people have something wrong with them: In that case, a person is willing to listen for a while so that he can later work off his own complaints. (The late Gardner Botsford called such encounters among his old-men circle

  PAPER PALATE

  Sweet Truth

  Melanie Rehak

  

  Once upon a time, in a land I’d like to visit for dessert—before Skinny Cow and Tasti D-Lite and before America came along and voted plain old vanilla its favorite flavor year after year after year—ice cream was serious stuff. It was so serious, in fact, that people believed it could be deadly.

  • Terry Gross, Bernard Pivot, Studs Terkel, and Michael Silverblatt

  • On Drink by Kingsley Amis

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 30 Jan 2010 01:41

  • by Don DeLillo

  • Scott McLemee on A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates 1974–1997 by Cornelius Castoriadis
  • Hua Hsu on The Faith of Graffiti by Jon Naar, introduction by Norman Mailer, Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, and Born in the Streets: Graffiti edited by Hervé Chandès

  • Goodbye to people's historian Howard Zinn

    His work taught us that history doesn't just belong to the powerful …

  • Salinger's Final Mystery

    Novelist Nathaniel Rich mourns the loss of a literary hero-and fantasizes …

  • John Edwards' Secrets

    The Daily Beast tracks the best parts of the new John Edwards tell-all …

  • America's Secret Afghan Prisons

    Anand Gopal Villagers and human rights officials accuse the United …

  • Tony Blair Channels Edith Piaf

  • Henryk Broder explains why being dubbed a "hate preacher" can feel like …

  JAN 29 2010

  Our way out of worldwide recession

  

  From The Economist, Leviathan stirs again: The return of big government means that policymakers must grapple again with some basic questions — they are now even harder to answer; and the world’s big economies were all hit by the recession — now the field is spreading (and ); and the Great Stabilisation: The recession was less calamitous than many feared; its aftermath will be more dangerous than many expect. The Global Debt Bomb: Spending our way out of worldwide recession will take years to pay back — and create a lot of pain. Global super-rich no longer look so benign: The crisis and recession have made the gap between the plutocracy and the rest of us a pressing political issue. A Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations:

  • 

    Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon

    The art of correspondence from Keats to Burroughs

    Adam Kirsch

    Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever: People and Their Letters is not the history of letter writing its subtitle seems to promise. Instead, it is an amiable, very readable collection of brief essays about dozens of correspondents, almost all of whom were not just "people" but professional writers. Mark Twain and Colette, Bruno Schulz and Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs and H. L. Mencken: These are not individuals you would want at the same dinner party, but they would all grudgingly admit to belonging

  Jan 30 2010

  Wednesday, February 24 8:00pm

  LAST THINGS

  Going Boom

  Walter Benn Michaels

  When, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history, he did so with mixed feelings. The good news, he thought, was that the ideological supremacy of free markets and of the political arrangement most suited to them (liberal democracy) had been established—even communists were talking about the importance of being competitive in the marketplace. The bad news was that without “the worldwide ideological struggle” between capitalism and socialism to inspire us, we

  • Artist Richard Prince has amassed an idiosyncratic collection of first editions and literary curios.

  • Talker in the City

    Though preparation for Titlepage is taking up much of his time these days, Daniel Menaker is still editing books.

  • 

    Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

    Jennifer Howard

    In 2004, Tim Butcher did a very brave and/or a very foolish thing: He tried to retrace Henry Morton Stanley’s 1874–77 expedition charting the course of the Congo River from Lake Tanganyika westward to the Atlantic Ocean. There was already a connection of sorts. Butcher and Stanley both worked as journalists for Britain’s Telegraph. Butcher, now the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent, was posted to Johannesburg in 2000 to cover Africa. That Telegraph-Africa bond, Butcher claims, led to an “obsession”

  • 

    The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America by William Kleinknecht

    Chris Lehmann

    It seems fitting that Ronald Reagan’s ninety-eighth birthday, on February 6, coincided with the Senate Republican effort to stonewall President Obama’s economic-stimulus plan. Doomed to failure in a key cloture vote after a trio of moderates pledged support for a compromise plan, GOP senators nevertheless thronged to deliver droning denunciations of the package before the c-span cameras. Government spending couldn’t alleviate the downturn in the economy, they intoned, since, after all, the

  • 

    Willem Frederik Hermans’s Beyond Sleep

    Michael Pye

    There’s a cold moment when you open a book that an entire nation officially loves. It can’t be quite that good, you think. It might say all too much about the country that loves it—in this case, Holland. Besides, when a book is approved as safe in so many schoolrooms, how can it possibly still be alive? And why doesn’t the rest of the world know about it already? So the first thing to say about Willem Frederik Hermans’s Nooit meer slapen (Beyond Sleep) is that forty-one years of being lodged in

  • 

    Reasons to Believe

    In his posthumous books Philip Rieff revisits faith and our inner and outer lives.

    Gerald Howard

    One summer's day in 1980, I was in the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library time-traveling back to the '60s. My reason for the trip was an anthology I was compiling of nonfiction pieces from and on the decade. My vehicle was the bound volumes of magazines at that branch, which I thumbed through page by page, month by month, year by year, in search of what was even then disappearing time. It was while doing so that I stumbled across a piece in a special supplement in the October

  • 

    Alberto Manguel’s The Library at NightThe City of Words

    Brian Sholis

    The prolific anthologist and writer Alberto Manguel has become, since the publication in 1996 of A History of Reading, one of the foremost gentleman scholars of books and the act of consuming them. In 2000, he wrote Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate, which narrates the stories told by an idiosyncratic selection of artworks and images, and he followed that in 2004 with A Reading Diary, which chronicles his experience rereading twelve favorite books in a year. Now, in The Library at

  • 

    Paul Hegarty’s Noise/Music: A History

    An intertwined crash course in outsider music and cultural studies, Paul Hegarty’s dense new survey, Noise/Music: A History, traces noise music’s avant-garde and experimental roots—from Futurism, Fluxus, and musique concrète to 1970s progressive rock and punk—and examines its more recent incarnations. In his attempt to characterize “noise,” Hegarty (who, in addition to teaching philosophy and visual culture, plays in two noise outfits) admits that the concept doesn’t have a static

  • 

    Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince by Mark A. Vieira

    Noah Isenberg

    "The picture business can only exist," observed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer mogul Irving Thalberg in a long letter to a fellow studio executive in 1933, "on the basis of real entertainment, glamour, good taste, and stars." Thalberg adhered to that formula for much of his intense, frequently brilliant career as one of Hollywood's most influential producers in the age of the studio system. By the time he penned these words—he was in his early thirties and beginning to fear that the assembly-line approach

  • 

    The Invisible Constitution by Laurence H. Tribe

    Michael O’Donnell

    American legal education holds few horrors greater than the wooze-inducing editorial content that pads casebooks on constitutional law. The notes that follow court opinions are either so deadly simple or so impenetrably dense as to frighten law students into pushing their casebooks somewhere to the back of their computer desks so as to plunge into another game of Cornhole. I was put in mind of that avoidance tactic as I read Laurence Tribe’s The Invisible Constitution and came across this mouthful:

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    Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher

    James Poniewozik on Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher

    James Poniewozik

    In the well-off northeastern suburb of Stonewood Heights, Ruth Ramsey is the high school Health & Family Life—that is, sex-ed—teacher. Her job is to shepherd the enclave’s adolescents on their glide path from affluent school to prestigious college free of pregnancy and STDs, by educating them in the ways of safe sex. Or at least it was, until members of a new fundamentalist church, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, accuse her of advocating oral sex after she remarks in class that “some

  

  William T. Vollmann has traveled to unforgiving and turbulent places in search of insights into the human condition, conducted exhaustive research, and written epic works that commingle genres, deepen our perception of history, intensify our sense of empathy, and complicate our moral equations.

  • Mary Gaitskill

  • A. M. Homes

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