Metaphysical Dog, Frank Bidart’s latest book of poetry, begins with a poem, also called “Metaphysical Dog,” that glimpses the eponymous dog doing what dogs do, namely rolling on its back, “butt on couch and front legs straddling / space to rest on an ottoman.” This impression of listlessness is interrupted by a severe voice (seemingly of the poet):
A colorful assortment of international tradespeople, drug-pushers, swindlers, and fraudsters, spammers have become a familiar feature of our digital landscape. Finn Brunton’s investigation of the question of spam, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet — the problems of defining it, understanding it, and tackling it — takes us to the front of an ongoing and highly sophisticated technological war, a keenly contested territorial struggle for control of the information superhighway.
On October 7 1989 East Germany turned 40. For the leaders of the first self-certified “workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil”, this was a moment of great celebration, occasion for a party to which all the top brass of the communist world were invited. Another birthday party in October 1989 is at the centre of Eugen Ruge’s wonderful debut novel In Times of Fading Light, a German bestseller that tells the story of the GDR over 50 years through four generations of a family.
Whenever I sit down to write about a place that’s become very familiar, my first impulse is to imagine it in the strangest way possible. I try to take in its mood, faces, and streets as if for the first time, and then give them a darker, more obscure, slant. For my new novel Asunder, I aimed to do this above all for the sections set in Paris, a city I’ve been visiting since childhood. This time I went to the city in search of the old “drafts and currents” that still blow through the streets, imprints from the nineteenth
The detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith — who was unmasked a few days ago as a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame — doesn’t provide the reader with many clues to its author’s real identity. There are no wizards, witches or dementors in this novel; no magic or sorcery in its plot. Instead, the book is set in an all-Muggles London and features a disheveled, Columbo-esque detective named Cormoran Strike who takes on a case that plunges him into a posh world of supermodels, rock stars, movie producers and social-climbing wives.
Call it the travelogue paradox: In books that purport to be about the perils and pleasures of life on the road, travel itself is typically no more than pretext. The real story being told has to with the self and its tentative steps into some great unknown. A travelogue is ultimately a coming-of-age story with its thumb stuck out.
It took the American novelist Lionel Shriver a long time to get our attention. Her first six books, published in the course of two decades, were met with a critical shrug and sales that Shriver later described as “in the toilet.” Her seventh, an epistolary novel narrated by the mother of a school shooter, was rejected by thirty publishers before a small house in England (Shriver’s adopted homeland) paid her all of two thousand pounds for the manuscript.
Every day in China, hundreds of messages are sent from government offices to website editors around the country that say things like, “Report on the new provincial budget tomorrow, but do not feature it on the front page, make no comparisons to earlier budgets, list no links, and say nothing that might raise questions”; “Downplay stories on Kim Jung-un’s facelift”; and “Allow stories on Deputy Mayor Zhang’s embezzlement but omit the comment boxes.” Why, one might ask, do censors not play it safe and immediately block anything that comes anywhere near offending Beijing? Why the modulation and the fine-tuning?
“Who is Curtis Harrington, and what other films has he made?” This was asked by an audience member after a screening of Harrington’s What’s the Matter with Helen? , a drolly macabre thriller about two middle-aged women operating a dance school in ’30s Los Angeles. In Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, Harrington sets down this query as evidence of his fated obscurity—though the filmmaker’s anecdote-rich posthumously published autobiography goes some ways toward answering both questions, and will hopefully earn his work recognition from a new audience.
The great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño liked to argue, plausibly enough, that poetry is a higher calling than fiction. He also liked to argue, with no plausibility at all, that he was a better poet than a novelist. “The poetry,” he said, “makes me blush less.” Like so many writers, Bolaño (1953-2003) was an unreliable guide to his own oeuvre.
Learning Cairo’s thousand-year history was a requirement at my alma mater, and it was usually taught with a resigned sigh, as if to admit, Al-Qahirah, “the city victorious” had always seen better days. Our professors at the American University of Cairo all seemed to mourn a place we would never know—a city of glamour and glory. But the secret of Cairo is that every generation mourns its brighter days, though in truth, more things stay the same than ever change. This might be why every few decades, revolution draws in the young and idealistic anxious to break the spell. Anyone
Even though we have not yet found proof of life beyond our planet, in recent years scientists have detected more and more places in the universe that could support life. It was only two decades ago that astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting a star other than the sun, and now they estimate that the Milky Way alone may be home to over seventeen billion Earth-sized worlds. What might life look like on those faraway planets, where conditions are drastically different from our own? Driven in part by the desire to answer this question, a range of scientists have sought
Death has been a great literary theme for so long you might think there’d be little left to say on the subject, but in recent decades the literature of death has taken an interesting and novel turn. Writers are recording their own deaths as they happen.
Kafka was always burning his stuff, or threatening to, or demanding that others do it for him. He asked at least three women to marry him, but something always came up to thwart the nuptials. (Once it was the beginning of World War I.) One of his obsessions for a time was the sassy Milena Jesenska, who called him Frank. “Frank cannot live,” she wrote to Brod. “Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . . He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk.”
This liminal moment, when the signs are everywhere that the climate in which human civilization developed is gone, seems a natural subject for fiction, and a number of recent novels have grappled with it—Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and Ian McEwan’s Solar among them. These books have been labelled “cli-fi,” but chances are that the name won’t stick. It makes the genre sound marginal, when, in fact, climate change is moving to the center of human experience.
Even in today’s global Gilded Age, Asia’s 1 percenters are in a class by themselves. No one doubts that the Wall Street banksters and hedgesters are plenty gilded, that the Silicon plutocrats have a certain swagger, that the petro-billionaires of the Persian Gulf or the former U.S.S.R. can buy the sports teams they please. But the new Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Morgans are emerging in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Beijing, the central nodes of the Chinese-speaking world. There the Chinese elite mediates between the Asian hinterlands, where speculation brings undreamed-of returns, and the supposed safe harbors of the West: luxury
Most Americans who know anything about the National Security Agency probably got their mental picture of it from a 1998 thriller called Enemy of the State. A lawyer (Will Smith), swept up by mistake into the system of total surveillance, suddenly finds his life turned upside down, his family watched and harassed, his livelihood taken from him and the records of his conduct altered and criminalised.
Why do they hate us? Why do they love us? Why do they love us and then hate us? Why do they hate us and then love us? (OK, a little wishful thinking.)
At one point in The Skies Belong to Us, Brendan Koerner’s riveting second book, a troubled Vietnam veteran informs his girlfriend that they will be hijacking a plane to North Vietnam before settling in Australia. “There was only one way she could possibly respond to such a deliciously extreme proposal,” writes Koerner: “’So, what do I wear to a hijacking?’”
One day not so long ago, Rebecca Solnit found herself with an apricot problem. Her mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and about a hundred pounds of the fruit had been harvested from a tree in the yard of the home where her mother could no longer live, then deposited—fragrant and overripe—on the floor of Solnit’s bedroom. “There they presided for some days, a story waiting to be told, a riddle to be solved, and a harvest to be processed.” With this seemingly simple story, Solnit opens a door into a maze of stories within stories, a dreamlike memoir composed
