culture Spring 2024

Tongues Untied

THE LINGUIST ROSS PERLIN is an encyclopedist of New York City’s microworlds. In 2016, when he took me and ten others on a tour of Ridgewood, Queens, he alerted us to the presence of a dozen languages spoken in a two-square-mile radius, including Syriac, Yiddish, Malayalam, Haitian Creole, and Kichwa. He led us into an ancient, black-and-white-tiled, espresso-scented Sicilian social club, where a retired nonagenarian factory worker proudly discussed his dialect, Partanna. Later, we drank beer and ate bratwurst at the Gottscheer Hall, a tavern and cultural center for the Gottscheers, a tiny

interviews May 02, 2016

Karan Mahajan talks with Adam Ehrlich Sachs

That Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s caustic and absurdist story collection is being released in time for Father’s Day resembles nothing more than a joke you might find in the collection itself. Sachs, who is thirty and has written for Hollywood, is a newcomer to fiction, but it’s hard to imagine a more assured debut: Each of its 117 father-and-son parables is saturated with sadness, cruelty, and, of course, humor.

That Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s caustic and absurdist collection Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables, and Problems is being released in time for Father’s Day resembles nothing more than a joke you might find in the collection itself: A well-meaning father (here, the publisher) misinterprets the son’s book (a work of emotional terrorism aimed at both fathers and sons) as an act of love and exalts it within a stifling tradition of filial affection (Father’s Day). Dark hilarity ensues.

Sachs, who is thirty and has written for Hollywood, is a newcomer to fiction, but it’s hard to imagine a more

culture October 18, 2011

Black Noise

New York makes so much noise about itself, discusses itself so endlessly on its streets and in its bars, lends its name so freely to magazines and websites and newspapers, that the novelist foolhardy enough to engage with this nonstop tantrum of a place has little choice but to turn himself or herself into a noise-comprehender (The Fortress of Solitude, Netherland) or a noise-amplifier (Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Puttermesser Papers). I wasn’t aware that a third path exists until I read Teju Cole’s Open City—a novel that simply blots out the noise in favor of moments of eerie tranquility

print Feb/Mar 2011

The Don of Delhi

I.

The writer William Dalrymple lives in a farmhouse on the outskirts of New Delhi with his wife, their three children, four incestuous goats, a cockatoo, and the usual entourage of servants that attends any successful man in India’s capital city. The previous resident of the house, a British journalist, was driven from the country by death threats after he published an article in Time magazine outing the previous Indian prime minister’s bladder problems and habit of nodding off during meetings. Dalrymple is also British—Scottish, to be exact—but his controversial statements are more likely to

fiction Apr/May 2010

Veil of Fact

Pearl Abraham’s fourth novel, American Taliban, is the story of an American family riven by the disappearance of a young man, John Jude Parish, into the ranks of the Taliban weeks before 9/11. Though glancingly based on the life of John Walker Lindh, the novel differs in particulars: The eighteen-year-old Parish is a popular, intellectually curious character rather than a troubled teenager, and his journey from Washington, DC, to Afghanistan feels less like a radical quest and more like a pilgrimage that ends at the wrong shrine.

Setting the story in the year 2000, Abraham reminds us that