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The great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño liked to argue, plausibly enough, that poetry is a higher calling than fiction. He also liked to argue, with no plausibility at all, that he was a better poet than a novelist. “The poetry,” he said, “makes me blush less.” Like so many writers, Bolaño (1953-2003) was an unreliable guide to his own oeuvre.
Learning Cairo’s thousand-year history was a requirement at my alma mater, and it was usually taught with a resigned sigh, as if to admit, Al-Qahirah, “the city victorious” had always seen better days. Our professors at the American University of Cairo all seemed to mourn a place we would never know—a city of glamour and glory. But the secret of Cairo is that every generation mourns its brighter days, though in truth, more things stay the same than ever change. This might be why every few decades, revolution draws in the young and idealistic anxious to break the spell. Anyone looking to understand
Even though we have not yet found proof of life beyond our planet, in recent years scientists have detected more and more places in the universe that could support life. It was only two decades ago that astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting a star other than the sun, and now they estimate that the Milky Way alone may be home to over seventeen billion Earth-sized worlds. What might life look like on those faraway planets, where conditions are drastically different from our own? Driven in part by the desire to answer this question, a range of scientists have sought out life-forms that
Death has been a great literary theme for so long you might think there’d be little left to say on the subject, but in recent decades the literature of death has taken an interesting and novel turn. Writers are recording their own deaths as they happen.
Kafka was always burning his stuff, or threatening to, or demanding that others do it for him. He asked at least three women to marry him, but something always came up to thwart the nuptials. (Once it was the beginning of World War I.) One of his obsessions for a time was the sassy Milena Jesenska, who called him Frank. “Frank cannot live,” she wrote to Brod. “Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . . He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk.”
This liminal moment, when the signs are everywhere that the climate in which human civilization developed is gone, seems a natural subject for fiction, and a number of recent novels have grappled with it—Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and Ian McEwan’s Solar among them. These books have been labelled “cli-fi,” but chances are that the name won’t stick. It makes the genre sound marginal, when, in fact, climate change is moving to the center of human experience.
Even in today’s global Gilded Age, Asia’s 1 percenters are in a class by themselves. No one doubts that the Wall Street banksters and hedgesters are plenty gilded, that the Silicon plutocrats have a certain swagger, that the petro-billionaires of the Persian Gulf or the former U.S.S.R. can buy the sports teams they please. But the new Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Morgans are emerging in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Beijing, the central nodes of the Chinese-speaking world. There the Chinese elite mediates between the Asian hinterlands, where speculation brings undreamed-of returns, and
Most Americans who know anything about the National Security Agency probably got their mental picture of it from a 1998 thriller called Enemy of the State. A lawyer (Will Smith), swept up by mistake into the system of total surveillance, suddenly finds his life turned upside down, his family watched and harassed, his livelihood taken from him and the records of his conduct altered and criminalised.
At one point in The Skies Belong to Us, Brendan Koerner’s riveting second book, a troubled Vietnam veteran informs his girlfriend that they will be hijacking a plane to North Vietnam before settling in Australia. “There was only one way she could possibly respond to such a deliciously extreme proposal,” writes Koerner: “'So, what do I wear to a hijacking?’”
Such incredible moments recur throughout the book, an account of a spate of plane hijackings that took place during the sixties and seventies. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of a 2008 non-fiction thriller about a
In his introduction to the New York Review’s reissue of Russell Hoban’s oddball 1975 novel Turtle Diary, Ed Park characterizes the book as a sort of literary cousin to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s a humble tale of urban loneliness, quotidian in flavor—which makes it an anomaly in Hoban’s large, very strange, increasingly out-of-print body of work. To extend the music analogy, the Hoban boxed set is a hard-to-label compilation—“Eleanor Rigby,” yes, but also works of elaborate, Wagnerian fantasy, Zappa-level weirdness, and kid-friendly tunes. Through a career that spanned more than seventy
In 1989, most Americans had never even heard of gay marriage, and certainly couldn’t conceive that it would one day be legalized by popular vote. That year, Andrew Sullivan wrote a landmark essay for the New Republic, “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage.” Sullivan’s essay is one of the most important magazine articles of recent decades.
Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good, and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to. In Book 2 of My Struggle, subtitled A Man in Love, the master theme of death remains hauntingly present, but it comes to be paired with another: birth and what precedes it.