Even though The Stranger’s Child is less titillating than Hollinghurst’s earlier novels, I don’t think this has anything to do with an ideological softening. In fact, for all the playful narrative possibilities of Hollinghurst’s other books, with their non-traditional, non-futural, anti-marriage-plot-like couplings, I’d venture that The Stranger’s Child is oddly more uncompromising in its vision. More…
It takes confidence to sit in front of an audience, wearing clothes you may have slept in, using your rubbery face as your primary prop, to discuss warmly but ultimately damningly, for nearly two hours, a man you never met. A man thought of as a rare contemporary hero. A man who died five weeks earlier. What gives Mike Daisey the confidence and endurance is, I suspect, justice. More…
Born in Rehevot in 1944, Milchan is an eleventh-generation Israeli. Yasser Arafat reportedly told him, “You’re more Palestinian than me.” His “ancestors on one side can be traced back to the great medieval biblical commentator Rashi, and on the other side almost to King David.” This of course would make Milchan “almost” related to Jesus, which would make him—“almost”—related to God. More…
New York makes so much noise about itself, discusses itself so endlessly on its streets and in its bars, lends its name so freely to magazines and websites and newspapers, that the novelist foolhardy enough to engage with this nonstop tantrum of a place has little choice but to turn himself or herself into a noise-comprehender or a noise-amplifier. I wasn’t aware that a third path exists until I read Teju Cole’s Open City. More…
He lambasted an essay’s “methane” and praised another for its “sheer sphincter-shattering beauty.” Writing a short essay to render something you loved endlessly was “trying to blow a watermelon through a straw.” Most writing was “written half-asleep and read half-asleep,” whereas he was immaculately alive, which made you terribly eager to show that you were all there as well. More…
The Alcove One boys had little to do with what neoconservatism ultimately became. More importantly, the “conversion” narrative—in which erstwhile leftists or liberals saw the light after being, in Kristol’s infamous phrase, “mugged by reality”—mischaracterizes the neocons’ intellectual development, which was hawkishly anti-communist almost from the very beginning. More…
“Books aren’t about ‘real life,’” a minor character says early on in Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel. “Books are about other books.” In a clever literalization, The Marriage Plot is very much about other books. Eugenides announces this on the first page, in an inventory of Madeleine’s bookshelf, and as the novel progresses and the books mentioned or quoted or discussed pile up, the book’s bookishness is only confirmed. More…
The novels Schryer selects chart the fleeting period when “social trustee professionals”—“professionals who combine specialized expertise with a commitment to public service”—were not only the principal purveyors but also the major subject of American fiction. The postwar period saw a glut of novels about professors and their ilk, the students and writers floating about their periphery. More…
I remember the first time I ordered cable television on my own behalf, how the company representative, a faceless woman with a practiced monotone, prattled on over the phone, reciting the prices and programming details of the various packages she could offer me, until at last, confounded, I broke in: “Look,” I said. “The only thing I care about is ESPN.” More…
“Luc Boltanski’s On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, published in French in 2009, has just come out in translation from Polity, and I’m really learning from it.” “Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette is a creepy exciting little French book.” Our summer reading recommendations keep coming, with more thrillers, biographies, and Kathleen Hanna. More…
“I’ve been reading Houellebecq’s new novel The Map and the Territory. As of about halfway through, I can report no sex.” “I’d like to propose that all American teenagers give their copies of Please Kill Me and Letters to a Young Poet a rest and instead read Alice Echols’s impressive history of American radical feminism.” Editors and contributors share their favorite memoirs, novels, and philosophical treatises for the summer. More…
But what if the intern’s gift sucks? It’s better—less thorny—to be paid a salary and maintain the distinct distance commerce imposes. In fact, the word “professional” as we tend to use it refers to exactly this personal remove. (Phoning your boyfriend from the office: unprofessional.) Then employers don’t have to pretend to compensate in attention or favors, nor can they resent such compensations. More…
Levé is hardly the only contemporary writer who seeks to rescue spontaneous engagement with one’s surroundings from the rush and emotional sterility of most daily communication. But while writers like Michel Houellebecq and Gary Shteyngart express contemporary disconnectedness through characters and plots that embody alienation and competition, Levé is concerned only with the way it feels to be bombarded by discrete facts. More…
Cercas explains that he tried for two years to write the story of the events of 23 February as fiction, as an experimental version of The Three Musketeers, but that he foundered against the fact that the reality itself had become fictional: this was an event that everyone had listened to live on the radio, and later seen on television, and saw again each subsequent year on television. More…
For Rodgers, words and ideas really are tools: not only do they help us make sense of the world, but they also help us remake the world. Of course, anyone who has been put to work in an industrial factory or at an internet terminal might reasonably quarrel with that view: those material conditions seem to be the main things shaping our world, giving us a sense of constraint or possibility. More…
When Marie NDiaye won the Prix Goncourt in November 2009, the event incited two discrete histoires scandaleuses in France. The first, decidedly smaller in magnitude, was that NDiaye refused to accept the title of “first black woman to win the prize.” “I don’t represent anything or anyone,” she told Agence France-Presse. “I grew up in a world that was 100 percent French.” More…
As a novelty, coffee was initially the object of some suspicion, as Nabil Matar shows in an inspired chapter of his Islam in Britain. While some claimed miraculous benefits from it, among its feared consequences were that it “causeth vertiginous headheach, and maketh lean much, occasioneth waking, and the Emirods, and asswages lust, and sometimes breeds melancholly.” More…
In L. J. Davis’s excellent A Meaningful Life, published a year after Desperate Characters, Lowell Lake, married managing editor of “a second-rate plumbing-trade weekly,” impulsively purchases a brownstone in Fort Greene. Once home to an industrial baron, it is now a half-decayed rooming house. The novel is dense with details of Lowell’s labor: by its final third, neither he nor the narrative leaves the house. More…
“Between Camus, Sartre, and Genet, Americans rarely escape the educational system without some exposure to French postwar fiction. But when it comes to Germans, it tends to be Sebald or bust.” Editors and contributors share their favorite books they read in 2010, from climate change thrillers and anthropological masterpieces to historical novels, new and classic poetry, and unconventional biographies. More…
If novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici has, for much of his career, written from the literary margin, it is because he has deliberately positioned himself as an anathema to the English establishment. He has pledged himself with monomaniacal devotion to arguing the cause of modernism, a form he would have us all recognize as the only viable mode of aesthetic expression. More…
In 1990 the economist Amartya Sen published a piece in the New York Review of Books the title of which had a strange quality of revelation and tabloid-worthy scandal. “More Than One Hundred Million Women are Missing” drew from new research to reveal that women’s mortality rates outside of Europe, the US, and Japan dramatically outstripped men’s. More…
In taking up the topic of the Arabs and the Holocaust, Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese leftist who teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, is choosing to venture out from the pro-Palestinian lines just at the point where all the Zionist guns are already aimed. His book admits the worst about his fellow Arabs and goes on as it can from there. It’s hard to tell whether the undertaking is very brave or very foolhardy. More…
There’s no way around it: Commonwealth is an irritating book. It shoves injustice in your face and then, having gotten your attention, refuses to hold still and look at the war or suffering or whatever, but instead soars so high into an atmosphere of self-generated abstraction that very soon you can no longer recognize any earthly landmarks at all. More…
In-person communication feels binary to me now: subjects are either private, confessional, and soulful or frantically current, determined mostly by critical mass, interesting only in their ephemeral status. Increasingly these modes of talk seem mutually exclusive. You can pull someone aside—away from the party, onto the fire escape—and confess to a foible or you can stay inside with the group and make a joke about something everyone’s read online. More…
More than elsewhere, the 1968 protests in Germany were a means of reckoning with the country’s past as well as a rebellion against the present. This has made German debates about the legacy of 1968 uniquely divisive. In Germany, right-wing detractors do not just hold 1968 responsible for the usual litany of sins from sexual lawlessness to moral vacuity; they also blame the 1968 generation for making impossible a healthy patriotism and for permanently disgracing the German nation. More…
The most controversial rap song in history, unfortunately, is not actually a rap song. “Cop Killer” was released in March 1992, one year after Rodney King’s beating and one month before the riots that followed his attackers’ acquittal. It included the lyric—sung, not spoken—“Cop killer / Fuck police brutality!” and was condemned by Tipper Gore in a Washington Post op-ed called “Hate, rape, and rap.” And still, it isn’t rap. More…
How does one come to have certain ideas about LA without actually experiencing it? Between 1980 and 2007, I’d watched any number of movies about the city (Pretty Woman, Shampoo, Double Indemnity) and some TV shows, too (Beverly Hills 90210; The Hills). I’d listened to The Doors, Jane’s Addiction, and X. At a certain point, I’d also begun fact-checking at a celebrity weekly. Most crucially, however, I’d read Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. More…
The impact of early Cahiers on global film culture is undeniable. As the New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote recently, reflecting on a Sight and Sound poll of film books in which Truffaut, Bazin, and the politique’s principal American exponent Andrew Sarris all took top five spots, the nouvelle vague “is still the cinema’s center of gravity.” But at the heart of this phenomenon is a myth of Cahiers’s priority that is impossible to sustain, and Bickerton’s book only amplifies it. More…
Berman’s writing in his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, is tighter, more claustrophobic. Gone are those sensational sentences; present are rage-filled declarations. The intellectuals have been willingly duped by a smooth Muslim con man; more important, they have abdicated their responsibility to anti-fascism and human rights. Berman is angrier than ever before, and indeed maybe for the first time. More…
The disconnect in Russia between language and reality can at times become disturbing. It isn’t just the standard “double-talk” of politicians, a screen of incomprehensible loan-words and convoluted syntax. It’s worse: a feeling that the basic descriptions of reality don’t correspond to their objects. Subway escalators that were working five minutes ago are arbitrarily declared “broken”; stores take random and unpredictable “technical breaks,” even if the technicality is a cigarette. More…
As the novel goes on we find that we are treated to a spectacle of suffering humanity, not displayed to provoke us to outraged enlightenment, but for our pleasure. We like Kathy’s plainness, her simple thoughtfulness, and her growing awareness of pain gives us a charge too. More…
D’Agata is at his best when he sheds the artifice of the lyric essay and writes straightforwardly about Yucca Mountain. He adroitly parses the project’s byzantine network of claims and counter-claims, reports and rejoinders, assurances and recriminations, risk assessments and ten-thousand-year forecasts—the endless generation of facts to supplant facts. More…
The Berlin U-Bahn, like the New York subway, is a surprisingly easy place to feel alone. People avoid eye contact in the crush, and the German announcer’s voice has a lilting softness at odds with the language’s guttural reputation. For the year I lived in Berlin, the U-Bahn was where I spent time in my own head, easing into the day. It was unusual when, riding the U1 through Kreuzberg, my faux-solitude was interrupted by the onset of paranoia. More…
Look up Greil Marcus’s chapter on Moby-Dick in Harvard’s New Literary History of America, and you’ll find a TV Guide description of John Huston’s 1956 film version: “A mad captain enlists others in his quest to kill a white whale.” It’s Melville’s epic reduced to a sentence of plot summary, which is funny, maybe. But then Marcus glosses the sentence, “Isn’t that America, the thing itself, right there?” and it starts to get confusing. More…
Is the philosophical program that emerges out of this double movement, between tradition and innovation, even coherent? It seems to me that x-phi simply cannot decide what it wants to do. More…
Great or only willing greatness, Reality Hunger neither dissolves nor founds but slips into a growing mode of authorial self-presentation, an instance of what I’d call either the fallacy of “hipness by analogy,” or “the fantasy of the writer as hip-hop DJ.” More…
Given that most critics are people who have devoted their careers to reading and rereading their favorite books—romantics who pursue the ideal in everything they read—finding Pushkin in Pelham and so on—there is something mysterious and even, as Kundera says, scandalous in Moretti’s willed and scientific choice to read what is formally interesting, with so little regard for what he likes. More…
There are a few obvious reasons why rural society (or lack of society) takes up so much space in our literature. The literary magazine Avsagd Hagle once did a tongue-in-cheek analysis of contemporary Norwegian poetry and found a surprisingly high frequency of the words “hand,” “bird,” and “tree.” More…
Solnit brings to public light the findings of academic social scientists, who have discovered that in periods of disaster people more often than not behave with altruism and empathy towards each other, rather than, as conventional understanding has it, violently and selfishly. This discovery alone is fascinating and unexpected, but in Paradise Solnit wants more. More…
Together with the quaint aesthetics of the Scandinavian countryside, this socialist backdrop is precisely what makes the genre work. It’s shocking enough when a bloated corpse turns up floating in Stockholm’s pristine, well-managed waterways or when a serial killer disrupts the huddles of little red cottages that dot the Swedish countryside. More…
The expectation in the American West, when looking at a map of public and private lands, is one of apparent socialism: the closest this country gets, at least on paper, to the appropriation of property by the people. The numbers are well known: 85 percent of Nevada is owned by the federal government, 57 percent of Utah, 50 percent of Idaho, even 45 percent of California. More…
Julie Metz is a woman who has been wronged by love. Her husband, “a writer and food enthusiast,” according to his obituary in the New York Times, cheated on her, repeatedly, exhaustively, with everyone from trusted neighbors to business-trip strangers. And now he has been punished: not by God, but by his widow. More…
For thirty years there were whispers about Laura. The manuscript that the dying author in 1977 told his family to destroy was not the Holy Grail, but the final king’s chamber in the pyramid of an oeuvre that rises stunningly from the literature of the twentieth century. After decades of hesitation, Nabokov’s son Dmitri is about to present the opus posthumum to the public. More…
In July 2008, while traveling on a Greyhound bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vincent Li beheaded his sleeping seatmate, a man he had never met, with a butcher knife. Li held up the head in crazed triumph as the bus screeched to a halt and the other passengers rushed out. More…
On December 7th, 2006, in a blog entry on “Offprints in the Digital Age,” honestly reprinted in its entirety, n+1 friend and frequent contributor Caleb Crain assured his readers, “not even I am so nineteenth-century as to have my essays privately printed.” But he has now gone and done just that! Not just his essays but the blog itself, “Steamboats Are Ruining Everything.” More…
Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, describes the emotional and cerebral satisfactions of skilled manual labor; it is an attempt to restore dignity to, and propose renewed pedagogical emphasis on, such work in the softer, more circumspect era of the “knowledge economy.” More…
When the reading is over and the inevitable question-and-answer session begins—and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course—the question invariably arises. “When exactly did you start writing?” As though it could be traced back to an exact date and time, like one’s first cigarette, or the loss of one’s virginity. More…
Communist ideologues are not known for their parenting skills. Take Marx, who saw families (especially his own) as obstructions to political ends; Che, a notorious ladies’ man who barely saw his children at all; Mao, with his four wives and ten (or more) kids; or even Stalin, who, before driving Nadezhda Alliluyeva to suicide, impregnated a 13-year-old during his Siberian exile. More…
Books on atheism have been selling like—well, like spiritual self-help books. The unexpected publishing success of Dawkins and Dennett, Hitchens and Harris has left some of us, at least on the more religious side of the Atlantic, fantasizing that we might be at the dawn of a secular New Age. More…
In a 1998 essay recently reprinted in his book Close Calls with Nonsense, critic Stephen Burt christened the “Elliptical school” of poetry, which encompasses writers prone to “hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory,” who “believe provisionally in identities (in one—or in at least one—‘I’ per poem),” but who, amid their “fast-forward and cut-up,” “suspect the I’s they invoke.” More…
As the US prepared to invade Iraq, Arthur Houghton began to worry about the fate of the country’s archaeological heritage. An antiquities collector and former White House international policy analyst, Houghton tried to locate the office in the Defense or State Department concerned with protecting Iraq’s heritage during the invasion. More…
It’s clear why academics would be interested in a book about peer review, but How Professors Think is being marketed for a general readership. Here, peer review serves as a proxy for all the acts of judgment that make up the university, all the decisions about who is admitted, who is rewarded, what is worth studying, and why. More…
The most striking pages of Beyond Belief tell the tale of Texas Rangers’ All Star Josh Hamilton’s astoundingly precocious talent. At the age of six, Hamilton could throw a baseball 50 miles per hour—his first peg from shortstop in Little League knocked his bewildered first baseman to the ground. More…
Alex Ross is the most important arts critic writing for the New Yorker. I do not mean he is the best writer (though he may be) or the most intelligent (also possible). Rather, more than his contemporaries, he draws an attention of rare sensitivity to modern classical music—a sphere of cultural activity that shows few signs of recovering in any respect from its mid-20th century decline. More…
Considered in the most cynical light, the American system of education as it now exists is a status machine, absorbing young citizens, sorting them according to rigid criteria. Walter Kirn’s new memoir comes tagged with the catchphrase “Percentile is destiny in America.” The book takes the form of a confession, as Kirn deploys his experiences to expose a sham. More…
This God- and sin-haunted man and the writing he produced so meticulously over the course of a half-century have come to stand, in our collective literary consciousness, for dullness, complacency, and an utter lack of relevance. This spring’s double-barreled canonization at least allows us finally to pose the question: Was Cheever great? More…
When Edgardo Vega Yunqué died last year, the Times ran a couple of eulogies on its website. He was described with quaint admiration—a local writer who found his inspiration in the Lower East Side. Many who knew him, however, posted less-than-fond memories to the website. Posthumous insults are usually directed toward the rich and famous, and Vega was neither. More…
November in Astana—Kazakhstan’s new marble and glass capital in the middle of the empty steppe—is blisteringly cold, and distractions from the harsh wind that whips across the desolate landscape are welcome. Standing outside of the airport one evening, I shared a beer and cigarette with a young man from the south of Kazakhstan, on the lengthy way to Moscow. More…
The pages in Proust’s long novel describing a first-ever telephone call are often admired for their rare sensitivity to the experience of a new technology. It has no equivalent in any contemporary fiction I know when it comes to an account of a first email read, or first social networking profile posted. More…
An angled picture gracing the book’s jacket shows Rudd bellowing into a megaphone—the image that gave Garry Trudeau the character of “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer in Doonesbury. From the memoir, it is clear that Rudd has almost entirely lost this booming self-confidence. More…
It becomes clear upon reading the first few chapters of this fast-paced, exhilarating novel—fingers fumbling to turn page after page after page, the urge to consume growing greater and greater, the desire to finish becoming with every sentence more acute—that How to Sell is not really about a conman selling jewelry. It is instead a novel written during a crisis in print culture about selling the novel. More…
Many readers are by now thinking: Wait a minute. Germany? Isn’t that where all that old fetish porn comes from? Aren’t Fassbinder, Klaus Nomi, and that guy who lip-synchs in the motel in My Own Private Idaho all, in their own way, German perverts? Yes, but that was a generation ago…. These days, it’s all as normal as watching the World Cup. More…
Petterson patiently maps the filaments that bind his characters’ interior lives and the exterior world, walking them not just through their surfacing memories of the past, but through their mundane muscle memories in the present. Milking a cow, cleaning a house: these acts provide physical cathexis for psychological pain, allowing his characters to organize and reorder a life dislocated by death. More…
Four years ago after writing twenty-one books about vampires, witches, mummies, psychic humans, and pleasure slaves (there were five books of erotica, under pseudonyms), she progressed one step further on the ladder of heroes. She announced that she was abandoning her vampires. From now on, all her books would be for and about “the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of all”: Jesus Christ. More…
“In literature,” said Henry James, “we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it.” What James blesses, Bolaño damns: his style ensures that we know little beyond our own ignorance, that his locales lack all plausible density, that everything seems always far away. More…
Christine Schutt, the author of two short story collections and two novels, was one of the last writers Gordon Lish published before he left Knopf. Her early books bear the strong imprint of the Lish method; her later books tell a story of evolving from it. More…
In Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the young sociologist Neil Gross has tried to use Rorty’s intellectual biography—his transformation from a philosopher working primarily within the narrow Anglophone analytic tradition to a digressive, itinerant intellectual on the model of his pragmatist hero, John Dewey—as a case study in an argument against certain kinds of piety. More…
Enthusiastic photoshopping has aided a transformation: Gone are the freckles and downy arm hairs of the predecessors. Breasts are surgically standardized; gym routines and spray tans produce identically toned and tinted bodies. Girls of all ethnicities blend together into one latte-colored woman, and the result looks computer-generated. More…
You don’t have to be Christian to appreciate Robinson—her work, while close to theology, comes down on the side of poetry, aspiring only to assent, not ultimate truth—but a knowledge of the faith’s dying words and urgent messages may well be required to get her meaning. More…
You would be forgiven, upon reading the negative reviews of Tony Judt’s Reappraisals, for thinking that Judt’s latest book was a Kassam rocket of scorn and derision directed at the state of Israel. Imagine your surprise when on cracking the spine of Reappraisals you find all of three essays, out of twenty-four, dedicated to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More…
Bolaño’s canonization has taken place so rapidly and completely, and with so little demurral, that one can only reluctantly pile aboard the bandwagon. But Bolaño is the real thing, as urgent, various, imaginative, and new as any writer active in the last decade. The question is: why not canonize anyone else? Why reserve for him the once-in-a-decade beatification? More…
In Bright Shiny Morning, James Frey tries to convey the full horror of Los Angeles. He does so by writing four, possibly five books, four of them current-day romances, one—apparently for context—a history of the place. But it doesn’t quite add up to an entire whole, nor does it convey that horror. More…
As a whole, The View from the Seventh Layer conveys the impression of an author who writes out of an impulse to congratulate his characters, his readers, and himself for being pure of heart in a cynical world—or for having emotions at all. It is through the combination of the fantastic and the sentimental that the work may be passed off as “literary.” More…
Yet as I read I could not help but think that the work he began has not continued, it has languished; that one of the unexpected effects of the civil rights movement on black culture was to distance us from any commitment to producing work in the highest realms. Ellison took a controversial position in the ’60s and after, by which he lived his life. His side lost. More…
It remains the method of most sci-fi novels to imagine a kind of heightened present, combining and extrapolating extant technologies (an MP3 player … in your brain!) to demonstrate their psychological and political effects. The post-catastrophe novel does the opposite; it takes away the MP3 player, and almost everything else. More…
This season brings two new high-profile dispatches, novels by Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) and Englander (The Ministry of Special Cases). Both have been justifiably praised. Both have been dissected for how Jewishness provides themes, artistic precedent, and color. Yet the blind spot remains: almost no one has asked what these books say about Jewishness—that fluid state—today. More…
Schine’s heroines are smarter and also older than is typical of the genre. They write biographies, own bookstores, and go on Darwin-themed cruises to the Galapagos to celebrate their divorces. But, more crucially, they suffer from the standard chick-lit problem and receive the universal chick-lit cure: marriage or at least sex with a charmingly cardboard male lead. More…
“When you go abroad,” I say, because my students need convincing to read the work of a traitor, “you will talk to Americans and Europeans who know the names of two Turks: Hrant Dink and Orhan Pamuk. And if you can’t participate in an intelligent and well-informed conversation about both of them, you will be at a disadvantage.” . . . I don’t say, “You may also look evil.” More…
A spate of recent books and articles and counter-articles and letters about the articles has declared that American women are in crisis. They’ve been dropping out of prestigious jobs and taking on all the housework; the accomplished ones can’t get a date; and then there are the kids, those black holes of endless need. More…
The familiar vegetarian “conversion” narrative relies on epiphanies: that moment when, staring at the lamb bourguignon, one suddenly imagines the live lamb within the cooked meat. Gandhi gave up meat for a time after suffering nightmares of animals he had eaten bleating and squealing within him. More…
