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What to do with all the empty white space that drifts over the 733 pages and nearly 200 fictions of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis? Make origami, maybe. Like Don DeLillo, who drafted Underworld at the pace of one paragraph per sheet of paper, Lydia Davis is as much sculptor as writer.
During a recent reading for her new book, The Importance of Being Iceland, Eileen Myles observed that pitching articles to magazines and museums left her with copious work to collect into a book “about how I’ve made a living.” The Importance of Being Iceland, while serving as a tongue-in-cheek record of these endeavors, is also a series of personal ruminations about what it means to be a poet at large in the world. “The poet is like the earth’s shadow,” Myles writes in “Universal Cycle” (1998). “The sun moves and the poet writes something down.”
If The Importance of Being Iceland reinforces
James Ellroy's astonishing Underworld USA Trilogy … is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.
“My father may have killed a man.’’ So opens Stephen Elliott’s riveting new book, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder. It’s the sort of line in which Elliott specializes: nakedly manipulative and all but impossible to resist.
In the introduction to her biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lori D. Ginzberg, a professor of history and women’s studies at Penn State, confesses that her previous writing has focused on “more ordinary women.” Perhaps that is what allowed Ginzberg to write an accessible, if slim, portrait of the pioneering women’s rights activist.
Ginzberg gives equal attention to Stanton’s domestic concerns and her political ones. The suffragette came into the fight for women’s rights more by circumstance than by enterprise. Her marriage to antislavery lecturer Henry Stanton immersed her in the growing
In June, Cass R. Sunstein’s confirmation as Barack Obama’s nominee for regulatory czar was hindered by Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss, who told online congressional newspaper The Hill, “[Sunstein] has said that animals ought to have the right to sue folks.” Chambliss was apparently referring to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, a book Sunstein edited in 2004, in which he argued that private citizens should be able to defend animals in court. However, when Chambliss’s statement was posted, Sunstein’s nuanced legal thinking was subject to distortion by bloggers and commentators,
I can't remember the first time I read Mercè Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves. It might have been when I was 13, living with my family in the high-rise suburbs of Madrid. It might have been when I was 17, back in Madrid with my mother for a few weeks in a sweltering rented room. Or it might have been when I was 19, on my own in the city, sharing an apartment near the train station with four South American girls.
We normally think of angels as emissaries from God, incandescent beings that might be mistaken for aliens, or sentimental covers on Hallmark cards. They’re perceived as the good guys, indicated by their everpresent accessory of the halo, practically a synonym for saintliness. But Chris Adrian intends to change that.
Every aging poet seems to write a book confronting his or her own mortality. By the time they do, many have already fallen into a rut, but John Koethe’s philosophical and wistful Ninety-fifth Street is his best book yet. In these accessible and surprisingly powerful poems, Koethe looks back at his youth, his encounters with his literary heroes and his evolution as a poet himself. “That’s what poetry is,” he writes, “a way to live through time, / And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back.”
A man dies under mysterious circumstances. A second man is called in to solve the mystery. But the second man fails to heed the implicit warnings left by the first man and soon tumbles into the rabbit hole. He is in grave danger. He solves the crime. Stasis is returned; life, of a sort, goes on. These are the old bones on which Colin Harrison fills out Risk, his marvelously compact seventh novel.
And yet Harrison has only a passing interest in pulp protocol. He seems to use it because it is sturdy and compelling, the same reason Jim Thompson used noir and Paul Auster used the detective novel.
We live in noise. The world is a booming, rustling, buzzing place to begin with (though many of us have shut out nature’s clamor), and to that we have added every conceivable vibration of our own making and every possible means of assault, whether it’s the vast, thrumming climate-controlling systems of our sealed buildings or the tiny earbuds nestled against our cochleae. What chance does quiet have against all this?
In "Cellists", the final, exquisite story in Kazuo Ishiguro's new collection, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and agrees to tutor a promising young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. It soon emerges that she cannot play the cello at all: she merely believes she has the potential to be a great cellist. "You have to understand, I am a virtuoso," she tells him. "But I'm one who's yet to be unwrapped." For her, and for many other characters in the book, music represents an ideal self that has little to do with reality. In the end, she marries someone