culture August 16, 2016

Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya

There’s something daunting about the subtitle of Revulsion: Thomas Bernard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya and translated from Spanish by Lee Klein. For one thing, it presumes familiarity with the influential, congenitally grave Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. For another, it’s a mouthful. One thing it isn’t, though, is false advertising.

There’s something daunting about the subtitle of Revulsion: Thomas Bernard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya and translated from Spanish by Lee Klein. For one thing, it presumes familiarity with the influential, congenitally grave Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. For another, it’s a mouthful. One thing it isn’t, though, is false advertising: Revulsion, Moya’s fifth book to be translated into English, is indeed a work of imitation—a tribute and a parody as well as an original voice. The book describes the “intellectual and spiritual misery” of 1990s San Salvador, the capital of a

culture December 06, 2012

Self-Control by Stig Sæterbakken

In Self-Control, a novel by the Norwegian writer Stig Sæterbakken, an aging creature of habit named Andreas Felt goes on a rampage. At least he thinks its a rampage. To others, his behavior amounts to a number of small if calculated attacks on social politesse. Vying for the attention of his daughter Marit over the course of a lunch date, Andreas casually (and untruthfully) mentions his impending divorce from her mother. Returning to work, he vehemently upbraids the head of the company. Later, he humiliates a boorish family friend named Hans-Jacob over dinner and grossly over-tips a waitress.

culture April 17, 2012

Jeff, One Lonely Guy by Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields and Michael Logan

One of the most exhausting aspects of life in the age of digital immediacy—a time when popularity is measured in Facebook “likes” and when important news stories trend on Twitter before being recognized by the media—is constantly having to hear about life in the age of digital immediacy. It seems that there’s an entire camp of journalism devoted to proclaiming its own redundancy in the face of social networks, memes, and the broadband-heightened rate of information exchange. And it’s hard to believe that a generation raised on continual technological advances can be so easily impressed with so

culture September 28, 2011

Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy

If you happen to have grown up in America, chances are you hail from someplace other than where you are right now. Chances are also that, if you happen not to be native to the one of the coastal catchalls whose skylines regularly adorn book covers, nobody else much cares which obscure municipality thrust you from its bosom—and God help you if you want to write a novel about your hometown. When the dispiriting majority of contemporary fiction either takes place in New York City or in some nebulous, undifferentiated suburbia, the implication seems to be that in our haste to preserve the state of

JW McCormack