In “Darwinism,” the impassioned polemic that opens The Death of Adam (1998), the first of her four philosophical-theological essay collections, Marilynne Robinson hurls a flaming spear at all of modern thought:
When he was eighteen, southern singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt was in a car accident that partially paralyzed him from the neck down. He had been drinking and flipped his car into a ditch; no one else was hurt. Chesnutt would never walk again, but about a year after the crash he regained limited use of his arms and hands—just enough to play a few simple chords on the guitar. “My fingers don’t move too good at all,” he told Terry Gross in a 2009 NPR interview. “I realized that all I could play were . . . G, F, C—those kinds
Are you a music lover who’s spent twenty years wincing whenever you hear the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Rihanna, Ke$ha, or Katy Perry th-th-thumping out of passing car radios? Or are you someone who does enjoy chart pop, but mainly as an emotional off-ramp during your afternoon commute or as a launching pad for a dance party?
“CHILD ABUSE, INCEST, rape, fierce sibling rivalry, animal brutalization, rebellion, fratricide”—no, this isn’t the sign-in sheet at the gates of hell; these are the subjects of fairy tales penned by the Brothers Grimm as listed in Jack Zipes’s introduction to this gloriously macabre illustrated selection. The all-too-familiar versions of “Snow White,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Cinderella” are not the stories that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected in a series of editions beginning in 1812. Even in that less fastidious time, the bloody mayhem was judged to be a bit much for children, and subsequent decades of bowdlerizing and Disneyfication have
The life of Haydée Santamaría was divided between a few days of heroism and decades of bureaucratic toil. A new biography by the poet and activist Margaret Randall, who knew and loved her, tells stories of courage and sacrifice that sometimes make her sound too amazing to be true. She was one of two women (with Melba Hernández) who took part in the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks that launched the Cuban Revolution, and from the guerrillas’ victory in 1959 until her death in 1980, she was the force behind the culture and arts institution Casa de las Américas.
By nearly all accounts, Rio de Janeiro’s Summer Olympics were not as bad as they could have been. In spite of green pool water, Ryan Lochte’s lies, and terrible American TV ratings, there were a lot of people who made a lot of money. Brazillionaires, a recent journalistic account of Brazil’s billionaire class, is a capable and thorough examination of the kinds of Brazilians who profited from the Games. The book chronicles the accumulation, entrenchment, maintenance, and expansion of the country’s largest fortunes and business empires.
As almost anyone over age fifty and almost no one under age thirty will remember, on February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by a small, strange group that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA was less an army than a club; it consisted of one black man and fewer than a dozen young white men and women; its most cogently stated aim was to bring “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” At the time of her kidnapping, Hearst was nineteen years old. A granddaughter of William
Advice is so much more enjoyable to give than it is to receive that its long flourishing as a genre—from the conduct books and periodicals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the current plethora of columns, livechats, and podcasts—could seem mysterious. Of course, watching other people being told what to do might be the most fun of all, which surely helps account for the enduring appeal of the advice column, and explains why living online seems only to enhance that appeal. Yet the genre is also unusual in the opportunities it offers a writer, in its combination of surprise
Jonathan Safran Foer is the Louis C.K. of the Jews. “I feel like America is the world’s worst girlfriend,” Louis says in one of his routines. “When somebody hurts America, she remembers it forever. But if she does anything bad, it’s like, ‘What? I didn’t do anything.’” Foer, too, likens romance to world events. In his new novel, Here I Am, he compares the dissolution of a marriage to a devastating earthquake in Israel. But where Louis plays this type of hyperbole for laughs, we are never quite sure how to react to Foer’s histrionics—he’s both the teller of the
Avant-garde writers tend to think that their work is unpopular because it is difficult. I tend to think there is another reason: most avant gardists sound like total jerks. They’re always telling you the things you like are bad and old, and that in order to remain relevant you need to like the new, innovative thing they’re doing. If you enjoy reading a realist novel with an engaging plot, character development, and sharp dialogue, you must be stuck in the nineteenth century. If you like imagery in your poetry, you are basically a fascist. To deny this is to demonstrate
On a Saturday evening in July 2013, just before 6:30, James Rhodes was recorded on a surveillance camera walking into a Metro PCS cellphone store in Jacksonville, Fla. He was wearing a black do-rag and a blue bandanna, which he pulled over his nose and mouth. Shelby Farah, the store manager, stood behind the counter. Rhodes pointed a gun at her and demanded the money in the cash register. Shelby gave it to him. Then Rhodes shot her in the head. She was 20 years old. He was 21.
It feels a bit strange to say this now, but in the spring of 2014 there was no better place to work than Gawker. For a certain kind of person, at any rate — ambitious, rebellious, and eager for attention, all of which I was.
In a recent essay, the poet Solmaz Sharif lamented that so few contemporary American poets write about American wars. The reluctance to touch the topic, she thought, often came from a well-meaning humility: Unless the author has a personal experience with war, they think they can’t write it. Yet this demurral, Sharif wrote, paradoxically “drops the burden of actual critique on the survivors themselves,” or else leaves it “to vets and embedded journalists who invade and then get to write about their invading, doubling their power.”
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 densely populated republic saddled with a corrupt,
The news that the United States had killed 150 unnamed individuals in a country halfway around the world with which it is not at war generated barely a ripple of attention, much less any protest, here at home. Remote killing outside of war zones, it seems, has become business as usual. This is a remarkable development, all the more noteworthy in that it has emerged under Barack Obama, who came to office as an antiwar president, so much so that he may be the only person to win the Nobel Peace Prize based on wishful thinking.
I spent years of my adulthood poring over the documents related to my father’s death by car crash—news articles and photographs, police reports, his death certificate and autopsy. I have files of this stuff, and much more, in boxes above my wife’s closet. I’ve met the man who killed my father, once in 2008, at his back fence in Marion County, Florida, where, barring the eighteen months he spent in prison, he’d lived his whole life, and again in 2013, after chasing him into the woods by his house. All this settled nothing. I know the aimlessness of grief. So
Patrick Modiano’s work casts a wary look at personal and collective histories of the French mid-twentieth century. Rather than nostalgia, this looking-back is imbued with a “sense of emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been destroyed, razed to the ground.” Each of Modiano’s novels is, in the words of Adam Thirlwell, “a new restatement of a single unsolvable crime.” Whether that crime manifests as the sin of a whole nation (Nazi collaboration in The Occupation Trilogy) or the sin of one person (murder or betrayal), it inflicts a moral injury more than a material one: it is
“Regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all,” explains the unnamed narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel Pond, which leaves us in the idle hands of a woman who has abandoned academe and retreated, alone, to a stone cottage in the Irish countryside. Here, she has given herself over to a ripe compulsion to grammatize her experience of the world. “I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” For the time being, she writes in
Francis Galton was an idealist. He was a scientist, a gentleman, and a reformer. He dreamed, according to Evan Kindley, of “a world remade by asking the right questions.” In 1870, he looked to realize that dream, submitting a seven-page set of questions to 180 of his colleagues in the British Royal Society in which he asked after their education, their temperament, ancestry, religion—even the rim size of their hats. In the years that followed, he would become the “founding father of questionnaire research,” writing several books based on his surveys of his friends and of strangers, and establishing “the
It is fitting that White Nights in Split Town City, the strange and striking debut novel by Annie DeWitt, opens with “When” by Sharon Olds, a poem that pairs atomic dread with the familial. A young mother hears a “noise like somebody’s pressure cooker / down the block, going off.” Holding her small daughter, she steps outside onto the lawn and sees a bright ball in the sky—they watch it “rise and glow and blossom and rise.” Surprisingly, the poem ends not with an image of apocalyptic terror, but one of grace: the child reaching up, arms open to the
