• review • August 15, 2013

    World Lite

    The n+1 editors

    World Literature certainly sounds like a nice idea. A literature truly global in scope ought to enlarge readers’ sympathies and explode local prejudices, releasing us from the clammy cells of provincialism to roam, in imagination, with people in faraway places and times. The aim is unimpeachable. Accordingly, nobody says a word against it at the humanities department conclaves, international book festivals, or lit-mag panel discussions where World Literature is invoked. People writing and reading in different languages (even if one language, English, predominates) about different histories and

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  • review • August 14, 2013

    Lea Carpenter's "Eleven Days"

    Roy Scranton

    Eleven Days wants to be a fable, or a myth: in her debut novel about a Navy SEAL and his mother, Lea Carpenter presents a handful of stylized, archetypical figures marching toward their fated ends. As with another recent American fable about the Terror Decade, Zero Dark Thirty, the complicated, messy reality of ten years of American military adventurism overseas is eschewed in favor of something more elemental and operatic.

    The novel tells the story of Sara, a middle-class, hard working single mom, and her son Jason, a commando who goes MIA during an important mission in Afghanistan. Jason is

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  • review • August 13, 2013

    On the Art of Rabble-Rousing

    Phillip Maciak

    For the past several weeks, pundits have been attacking Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth as something like a work of covert literary terrorism. In the week following the release of the book, the Fox News journalist John Dickerson called Aslan out for masquerading as an historian, penning what he termed a “fast-paced demolition of the core beliefs” of Christianity, and then accused the “liberal media” of endeavoring to hide Aslan’s Muslim faith. Dickerson’s piece led to an avalanche of nasty Amazon reviews and a now-famous on-air interview with Fox based on the

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  • excerpt • August 11, 2013
    Galaxie 500, Paris, 1989. Photo by R. Deluze. From Temperature's Rising: An Oral History of Galaxie 500.

    Galaxie 500 and the (Upper) Class Consciousness of Indie Rock

    Alec Hanley Bemis

    The perfect encapsulation of Galaxie 500 appears rather late in Temperature’s Rising, a brief but intriguing scrapbook and oral history about the band. A college classmate of theirs explains, “Their album covers made a statement. Cool Restraint. Educated. Upper Class. Lots of Social Contacts.”

    This frames them in a way few musicians would aspire to be framed. From one perspective, it could even be taken as a devastating bon mot. First of all it’s about their album art, not their music. Second, the word “restraint” was anathema to rock and pop music until quite recently. If you still look

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  • review • August 08, 2013

    On Narconovelas

    Jorge Volpi

    All wars have their bards, and Mexico’s narco wars are no exception. Since 2006, myriad fictions have been added to the torrent of news articles, academic studies, poetry, artworks, movies, telenovelas and music (the famous narcocorridos—corridos are narrative folk songs) about narco culture. Of course, long before Calderón’s war, drug traffickers, especially in the northern states of Sonora and Sinaloa, had inspired countless corridos and been taken up as subjects by Mexican novelists.

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  • review • August 07, 2013

    Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain

    Zeke Turner

    The story of Americans exiling themselves to Europe has been told many times. These poor souls just won’t give up their search for new answers in the old world. In the past few years, characters like Ben Lerner’s narrator in Leaving the Atocha Station have gone abroad, hoping to find their real selves by leaving behind everything that's ever defined them. Usually, what they want to flee goes with them—personal baggage on a trip to the continent. So they return to the same question that’s been asked time and again: Can a change of scenery solve problems we have with ourselves? Has an existential

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  • review • August 05, 2013

    Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff

    Paul Rudnick

    The book is a heartfelt, charmingly profound American epic. At a breezy 113 pages, it charts pretty much the entire 20th century, through a series of interlocking lives. Early on, we meet Margaret, a redheaded, brutally poor preteen who leaves school to work in a Chicago slaughterhouse. When the male employees jeer at her, she retreats, in her thoughts, “To a place close yet distant, both here and not here; / Present, but untouched by doubt or by fear.”

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  • review • August 01, 2013

    Life in Beirut

    Nathan Deuel

    Nobody died. But Beirut is engulfed in flames, cars are mangled, glass is under foot, dozens are bleeding, and a faction of rebels claims responsibility. Shopkeepers roll gates; kids are yanked out of school. A day later, however, traffic is so thick and life so normal that it can take an hour to get across town.

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  • review • July 31, 2013

    Leakonomics: Edward Snowden and the Pirates

    Joshua Clover

    This year, the newly formed Icelandic Pirate Party won three seats in the national parliament, the oldest parliament in the world (self-proclaimed). In early July, the Pirate Party trio introduced a bill to grant Edward Snowden citizenship. And with that, the two great metaphorical senses of “leak” purled together: the free beer of pop’s petty piracies and the freed speech of classified data. Neither the media conglomerate’s digital cargo vessels nor the ship of the security state can remain pitch-black. Information wants to leak.

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  • review • July 30, 2013

    The Fabulist Professor

    Eric Benson

    Professor Borges, a transcription of a British literature survey course the Argentine fabulist taught in the fall of 1966, is the kind of volume that gets published only if a scholar is canonical, inspires cultish devotion, and, almost certainly, is long dead. The twenty-five lectures that make up the book are ostensibly introductory, but they’re only masquerading as English 101. Instead, this is Borges’s highly idiosyncratic tour of his favorite authors and most revered myths, a view of history and literature as filtered through his capacious, whimsical mind.

    The book begins with the Anglo-Saxon

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  • review • July 29, 2013

    Reading the Language of Cinema

    Martin Scorsese

    Frank Capra said, “Film is a disease.” I caught the disease early on. I felt it whenever I walked up to the ticket booth with my mother or my father or my brother. You’d go through the doors, up the thick carpet, past the popcorn stand that had that wonderful smell—then to the ticket taker, and then in some of the old theaters there would be another set of doors with little windows and you’d get a glimpse of something magical happening up there on the screen, something special. And as we entered, for me it was like entering a sacred space, a kind of sanctuary where the living world around me

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  • review • July 26, 2013

    The Summer of the Elder Tree by Marie Chaix

    Sarah Gerard

    In her elegant and memoiristic novel The Summer of the Elder Tree, Marie Chaix fills in the various silences of her past in order to overcome a ten-year hiatus from writing, which started following the death of her editor, Alain Oulman. Translated from the French by her husband, author Harry Mathews, the first American member of the Oulipo, Elder Tree (first published in France in 2005) concludes a triptych of Chaix’s work released by Dalkey Archive Press over the past year. The books draw on a troubling family history. In the first volume of the triptych, The Laurels of Lake Constance (published

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