Phyllis Fong

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  culture December 19, 2013

  A True Novel by Minae Mizumura

  To say that A True Novel is a remake of Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan is not inaccurate, but this only begins to crack open the book. Like the Emily Brontë classic, Minae Mizumura’s novel follows an impoverished boy who is haunted by his impossible love for a wealthy girl, and who tries to heal himself by amassing a suspect fortune. But while Brontë wrote at a time when the novel was still a relatively new art form, Mizumura is writing in the dying light.

  To say that Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel is a remake of Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan is not inaccurate, but this only begins to crack open the book. Like the Emily Brontë classic, Mizumura’s novel follows an impoverished boy who is haunted by his impossible love for a wealthy but wild girl, and who tries to heal himself by amassing a suspect fortune. But while Brontë wrote at a time when the novel was still a relatively new art form—young enough to be shimmering invention—Mizumura is writing in the dying light. This book, oddly compelling in its confluence of intellect and emotion,

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  interviews July 01, 2013

  Bookforum talks with Philipp Meyer

  "The thing is, it’s easier to write about someplace if you’re not from there. I’ll probably never write about Baltimore, where I grew up. I don’t trust my impressions of it: I don’t know which ones are real, which ones are sentimental, which ones are tied to experiences I had as a child or teenager or whatever point of my life. I don’t know how to parse those things out. "

  I met Philipp Meyer, author of 2009’s American Rust and the newly published The Son, at the bar of Dallas’s Belmont Hotel, which is cut into a hillside between I-35E and I-35W, the approximate reach of the frontier in the 1850s—the time of The Son’s opening events. Meyer’s epic new novel follows Eli McCullough, born in the first days of the Republic of Texas, who as a child is taken captive by Comanches and later returns to found an uneasy dynasty. Among the book’s sentences that could be read as themes for the whole: “There was nothing you could take that had not belonged to some other person.”

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  syllabi November 13, 2012

  Women on Women in Love

  Strangely enough, until now, Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 The Price of Salt has never had a proper film treatment. Announced at this year’s Cannes festival, the long-waited-for adaptation, directed by John Crowley and starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska, will start filming in February 2013. Published under the name Claire Morgan, Highsmith’s second novel is a slow, swoony tale of women in love and on the run in midcentury America: Opaque, orphaned convent girl Therese meets the older, glamorous Carol, a perfect Hitchcock blonde, while working the toy counter during Christmas rush at a New