Benjamin Strong

  • culture November 08, 2012

    Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

    Sean Howe's new history of Marvel Comics is a spirited account of a group of creative misfits taking on a staid industry giant, DC, and triumphing. It’s also the familiar tale of management prevailing over labor, of the suits crushing the talent. It’s the story—in other words, of how the villains won.

    Life, as depicted in the pages of Marvel Comics, is full of heroes and villains. Reading Sean Howe’s new behind-the-scenes history of the venerable publishing house that brought you Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and others, you begin to appreciate why. For although Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a spirited account of a group of creative misfits taking on a staid industry giant, DC, and triumphing, it’s also the familiar tale of management prevailing over labor, of the suits crushing the talent. It’s the story, in other words, of how the villains won.

    Founded in 1939 by Martin Goodman,

  • fiction Dec/Jan 2012

    The Orphan Master’s Son

    The Kim Jong Il that we meet in Adam Johnson’s second novel, set in North Korea, is no cartoon villain, no Team America marionette. He’s a three-dimensional character—a hairsprayed, jumpsuited, hopping-mad monomaniac, sure, but a man in whom we can recognize some of our own jealousies and desires. And although he is offstage more often than not in The Orphan Master’s Son, Dear Leader, as he’s usually referred to, is omnipresent in every conversation, every moment of intimacy, every sorrow that takes place somewhere in this fictional DPRK. He’s the glue holding together not just an entire

  • fiction Dec/Jan 2009

    MILES FROM NOWHERE

    Befitting the confessions of its opiate-eating narrator, Nami Mun’s first novel has a junkie’s jumbled sense of chronology. Unfolding in the New York City of the 1970s and ’80s, Miles from Nowhere contains a surfeit of period references (eight-track tapes and Riunite on ice), but the narrative moves back and forth in time so fluidly that it seems to take place, as the title suggests, in a province all its own.

    The narrator is Joon, the daughter of bickering Korean immigrants, who runs away at thirteen, after her father has abandoned her and her mother. Although Joon can’t decide which parent’s

  • fiction Feb/Mar 2008

    For Newell Ewing, a twelve-year-old malcontent growing up in a middle-class Las Vegas subdivision, the Strip—“The neon. The halogen. The viscous liquid light”—is a bright abstraction, beads on the horizon as distant and unattainable as the moon. One Saturday evening, chaperoned by his older friend Kenny, Newell makes his first visit to the casinos. He never comes home. Charles Bock’s first novel, Beautiful Children, opens almost a year after the fateful August night Newell ran away.

    Newell’s parents realize that their prolonged estrangement may have contributed to his disappearance. A former

  • fiction June/July/Aug 2007

    To paraphrase the compliment Joan Didion paid Fat City, Leonard Gardner’s classic 1969 novel set in Stockton, California, Richard Lange has got it right about Los Angeles. Dead Boys, his debut story collection, depicts average Southland life with unfaltering exactitude— the doughnut shop–cum-hangout, the sun’s merciless routine, Spanglish, and the disconsolateness of the carless. Such meticulously drawn commonplace scenery is remarkable in itself. But what’s most impressive about Lange’s tales is how his LA bypasses the usual accounts of nihilism and dystopia to signify instead the hard-luck