The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

Vendela Vida's new novel begins in a realist mode but sheds this skin as it goes, becoming in its second half a gently postmodern, surrealist philosophical meditation on the protean nature of personal identity. Here, a woman, once a competitive driver, leaves her old life behind in Florida and flees to Morocco, where she proceeds to reinvent herself: She is called many names, none of them her own.

Such a lithe, unassuming novel, Vendela Vida’s latest! In this study of fragility and resilience, lives and identities are revealed to be as precarious as houses of cards. The plot recollects that of Vida’s previous book, The Lovers, in that it, too, presents an American heroine looking for solace in the East in the aftermath of a crushing personal disaster. But The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is a much subtler and more agile creature. It begins in a realist mode but sheds this skin as it goes, becoming in its second half a gently postmodern, surrealist philosophical novel on the protean nature

culture February 02, 2015

Against the Country by Ben Metcalf

Perhaps you have wondered (and who hasn’t?) what sort of memoir Bob Ewell, redneck villain of To Kill a Mockingbird, might have written about his life of attempted child-murder and successful child-beating, drunkenness, perjury, and poaching after a long course of education in Juvenalian satire and Ciceronian rhetoric? Or what Jonathan Swift or perhaps Renfield, the “zoophagus maniac” in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, might have become had one of them ripened to manhood in the 1970s on the kudzu and rat-rich red clay of Goochland County, Virginia?

Perhaps you have wondered (and who hasn’t?) what sort of memoir Bob Ewell, redneck villain of To Kill a Mockingbird, might have written about his life of attempted child-murder and successful child-beating, drunkenness, perjury, and poaching after a long course of education in Juvenalian satire and Ciceronian rhetoric? Or what Jonathan Swift or perhaps Renfield, the “zoophagus maniac” in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, might have become had one of them ripened to manhood in the 1970s on the kudzu and rat-rich red clay of Goochland County, Virginia?

It is just these questions that Ben Metcalf’s Against