The first thing to say about The Art of Sleeping Alone is that it’s very French. It’s slim, chic and humorless, that is, a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume, filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa in India, the Greek island of Hydra.
Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images is a collection of what art historian and curator Julian Stallabrass describes as “loosely associated essays and interviews” on political images and the politics of image-making during war, with a focus on the recent war in Iraq. While photography has played a role in the portrayal of large-scale conflict since World War I, Iraq was the first war of the digital age. Journalism has always placed a premium on timeliness, but with digital photography, we no longer had to wait for film to be delivered or developed. As photojournalist
Marisha Pessl’s first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a maddening, twisty, eventual knockout of a book. It sparkled with showy erudition and the electricity of a true original. A prestigious, successful debut novel, it’s a tough act to follow. But here she is, in Night Film, thumbing her nose at sophomore slump.
World Literature certainly sounds like a nice idea. A literature truly global in scope ought to enlarge readers’ sympathies and explode local prejudices, releasing us from the clammy cells of provincialism to roam, in imagination, with people in faraway places and times. The aim is unimpeachable. Accordingly, nobody says a word against it at the humanities department conclaves, international book festivals, or lit-mag panel discussions where World Literature is invoked. People writing and reading in different languages (even if one language, English, predominates) about different histories and cultures and ideas: who could be against that?
Eleven Days wants to be a fable, or a myth: in her debut novel about a Navy SEAL and his mother, Lea Carpenter presents a handful of stylized, archetypical figures marching toward their fated ends. As with another recent American fable about the Terror Decade, Zero Dark Thirty, the complicated, messy reality of ten years of American military adventurism overseas is eschewed in favor of something more elemental and operatic.
For the past several weeks, pundits have been attacking Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth as something like a work of covert literary terrorism. In the week following the release of the book, the Fox News journalist John Dickerson called Aslan out for masquerading as an historian, penning what he termed a “fast-paced demolition of the core beliefs” of Christianity, and then accused the “liberal media” of endeavoring to hide Aslan’s Muslim faith. Dickerson’s piece led to an avalanche of nasty Amazon reviews and a now-famous on-air interview with Fox based on the question, “Why
The perfect encapsulation of Galaxie 500 appears rather late in Temperature’s Rising, a brief but intriguing scrapbook and oral history about the band. A college classmate of theirs explains, “Their album covers made a statement. Cool Restraint. Educated. Upper Class. Lots of Social Contacts.”
All wars have their bards, and Mexico’s narco wars are no exception. Since 2006, myriad fictions have been added to the torrent of news articles, academic studies, poetry, artworks, movies, telenovelas and music (the famous narcocorridos—corridos are narrative folk songs) about narco culture. Of course, long before Calderón’s war, drug traffickers, especially in the northern states of Sonora and Sinaloa, had inspired countless corridos and been taken up as subjects by Mexican novelists.
The story of Americans exiling themselves to Europe has been told many times. These poor souls just won’t give up their search for new answers in the old world. In the past few years, characters like Ben Lerner’s narrator in Leaving the Atocha Station have gone abroad, hoping to find their real selves by leaving behind everything that’s ever defined them. Usually, what they want to flee goes with them—personal baggage on a trip to the continent. So they return to the same question that’s been asked time and again: Can a change of scenery solve problems we have with
In 1952, six years after publishing its first book, Farrar, Straus & Company nearly failed. Founded by Guggenheim heir Roger Straus with $360,000 from his family and friends’ interests in department stores, mining, and brewing (the former Rheingold Brewery in Brooklyn served as the warehouse for its books), the firm had printed one hundred thousand copies of Mr. President, a quasi-official selection of President Truman’s papers and photographs. As Truman’s reelection campaign began, the book looked to be a hit, but a couple weeks after its publication, Truman reversed course and announced he wouldn’t run after all—and the book sank.
The book is a heartfelt, charmingly profound American epic. At a breezy 113 pages, it charts pretty much the entire 20th century, through a series of interlocking lives. Early on, we meet Margaret, a redheaded, brutally poor preteen who leaves school to work in a Chicago slaughterhouse. When the male employees jeer at her, she retreats, in her thoughts, “To a place close yet distant, both here and not here; / Present, but untouched by doubt or by fear.”
Nobody died. But Beirut is engulfed in flames, cars are mangled, glass is under foot, dozens are bleeding, and a faction of rebels claims responsibility. Shopkeepers roll gates; kids are yanked out of school. A day later, however, traffic is so thick and life so normal that it can take an hour to get across town.
About an hour into The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s meditation on nature, grace, Brad Pitt’s crew cut, and the laying of the foundations of the Earth, I turned to my wife, snuck a Twizzler from the bag in her lap, and said, “I knew this was going to cover a lot of ground, but I really didn’t expect the dinosaurs.”
This year, the newly formed Icelandic Pirate Party won three seats in the national parliament, the oldest parliament in the world (self-proclaimed). In early July, the Pirate Party trio introduced a bill to grant Edward Snowden citizenship. And with that, the two great metaphorical senses of “leak” purled together: the free beer of pop’s petty piracies and the freed speech of classified data. Neither the media conglomerate’s digital cargo vessels nor the ship of the security state can remain pitch-black. Information wants to leak.
Professor Borges, a transcription of a British literature survey course the Argentine fabulist taught in the fall of 1966, is the kind of volume that gets published only if a scholar is canonical, inspires cultish devotion, and, almost certainly, is long dead. The twenty-five lectures that make up the book are ostensibly introductory, but they’re only masquerading as English 101. Instead, this is Borges’s highly idiosyncratic tour of his favorite authors and most revered myths, a view of history and literature as filtered through his capacious, whimsical mind.
Frank Capra said, “Film is a disease.” I caught the disease early on. I felt it whenever I walked up to the ticket booth with my mother or my father or my brother. You’d go through the doors, up the thick carpet, past the popcorn stand that had that wonderful smell—then to the ticket taker, and then in some of the old theaters there would be another set of doors with little windows and you’d get a glimpse of something magical happening up there on the screen, something special. And as we entered, for me it was like entering a
In her elegant and memoiristic novel The Summer of the Elder Tree, Marie Chaix fills in the various silences of her past in order to overcome a ten-year hiatus from writing, which started following the death of her editor, Alain Oulman. Translated from the French by her husband, author Harry Mathews, the first American member of the Oulipo, Elder Tree (first published in France in 2005) concludes a triptych of Chaix’s work released by Dalkey Archive Press over the past year. The books draw on a troubling family history. In the first volume of the triptych, The Laurels of Lake
Adelle Waldman has cleverly chosen to tell the story of a younger generation’s romantic chaos not from the perspective of a woman panicked that she’s wasting her prime but from that of a young man trying to enjoy his. Her Nathaniel Piven, a thirty-something-year-old Brooklyn novelist and burgeoning public intellectual, is thoughtful yet careless, open-minded yet absurdly entitled. In trying to understand the source of his self-satisfaction, which is ultimately the source of his power, Waldman has written a book of stately revenge, exposing all that is shallow and oblivious about Nate, and men like him.
I am not in the habit of writing negative reviews. In fact, I’ve never written a predominantly negative review of a book. I just politely decline. But this really awful biography of Martin Amis got under my skin, and its warm reception by about half its reviewers caused that infection to erupt in the form of this review. A long time ago I published a critical biography (of Christopher Isherwood) when he was close to the end of his life. So I understand the problems of combining biography and criticism of a living writer and his work.
On entering a major Nigerian city, you’re likely to encounter some aged signage that welcomes you to the city and encourages you to enjoy yourself. For example, in Calabar, the welcome sign reads, “Welcome to Calabar. Come And Live And Be At Rest.” But in Lagos—Nigeria’s most populous city and its former capital—you get simply, “This Is Lagos.” The subtext is clear: This is a no-nonsense city. Lagos will not coddle you or gush mushy endearments. A common expression here is “shine your eyes,” which loosely translates to “keep your eyes peeled,” or “always have your wits about you.” Lagos
