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
In his introduction to the New York Review’s reissue of Russell Hoban’s oddball 1975 novel Turtle Diary, Ed Park characterizes the book as a sort of literary cousin to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s a humble tale of urban loneliness, quotidian in flavor—which makes it an anomaly in Hoban’s large, very strange, increasingly out-of-print body of work. To extend the music analogy, the Hoban boxed set is a hard-to-label compilation—“Eleanor Rigby,” yes, but also works of elaborate, Wagnerian fantasy, Zappa-level weirdness, and kid-friendly tunes. Through a career that spanned more than seventy books, Hoban tackled post-nuclear apocalypse dystopia (Riddley Walker),
In 1989, most Americans had never even heard of gay marriage, and certainly couldn’t conceive that it would one day be legalized by popular vote. That year, Andrew Sullivan wrote a landmark essay for the New Republic, “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage.” Sullivan’s essay is one of the most important magazine articles of recent decades.
Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good, and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to. In Book 2 of My Struggle, subtitled A Man in Love, the master theme of death remains hauntingly present, but it comes to be paired with another: birth and what precedes it.
Flattr is a three-year-old Swedish company. Its goal is to enable people to pay for things that they might not ordinarily pay for: YouTube videos, Flickr photos, GitHubs, Instagrams. The idea is for you to fund a monthly balance for your Flattr account and use it to monetize your own patterns of Web-based approval. At the end of every month, your Flattr balance gets distributed among the things that you had “favorited.”
To make Seven American Deaths and Disasters Goldsmith has combed through archival radio and television broadcasts of painful events over the past six decades: there are chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon; the explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger; the shootings at Columbine High School; the attacks at the World Trade Center; and the death of Michael Jackson — and he has transcribed the reports as they unfurled on the air, live and unmediated.
Beginning in the 1920s, an experimental literary modernism emerged in the small journals and tertulias of the major cities of Spanish America that would come to be known as the vanguardia. Its practitioners, mostly the sons of emergent bourgeoisies, adopted the methods of European modernists and altered them to fit the distinctive historical circumstances of early-twentieth-century Latin America—a moment when the region was both compelled by the imperial whims of the United States and drawn increasingly into the circuits of global capitalism. Few fictions of the vanguardia reflect the upheavals of modernization with the poignancy of Martín Adan’s explosive and
Since the late 1990s, cable television has yielded up a fresh batch of the sort of selfish, morose, profane, scheming, sometimes violent, sometimes seriously ridiculous male characters we used to have to seek out in movies by Sam Peckinpah and David Fincher, in novels by Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy, or in the poetry of John Berryman and Frederick Seidel. Grunge music for the eyes, this new brand of TV offered an escape valve for the pent-up anger and frustration of many real-life producers, writers, and directors who were suddenly freed from the constraints of network sitcoms and genre dramas.
The psychology of plain old everyday psychological time, the real, non-science-fictional stuff passing us by is the subject of British science journalist Claudia Hammond’s lively book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. It’s a book about mental apparatus. How do we know a moment has passed? Hammond’s best bet is that we use the brain’s dopamine system along with a few other brain components. “We are creating our own perception of time,” she writes, “based on the neuronal activity in our brains with input from the physiological symptoms of our bodies.” The answer is not in our stars
The 1990s punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl has had a resurgence in recent years, in books such as Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front (Harper Perennial, 2010), films like The Punk Singer, and the establishment of the Riot Grrrl Collection at NYU’s Fales library. The Feminist Press has just published The Riot Grrrl Collection, which presents vivid reproductions of zines, flyers, and other works from the Fales archives. Editor and archivist Lisa Darms recently sat down with The Riot Grrrl Collection contributors Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman to discuss the book, answering questions submitted by novelist Sheila Heti. The following
Minimalism in fiction is rarely conjoined with outbursts of passionate lyricism, and still more rarely do novels about crime and detectives carry out a philosophical quest. Derek Raymond’s much-admired “Factory” novels are bold and intriguing hybrids: as with the two novels under review (first and fourth in the series of five all now published by Melville House), they are idiosyncratic police procedurals narrated by an unnamed Detective Sergeant of the London Metropolitan Police who so identifies with the victims of his investigations that he becomes involved in their (imagined) lives and is drawn, often at great risk to himself, into
I didn’t make it to the huge Garry Winogrand retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco but if the very large catalogue is anything to go by the show was obviously … not nearly big enough! How could it have been? Winogrand is inexhaustible. There’s probably more to look at in a Winogrand photo than in one by anyone else (part of the attraction of a wide-angle lens was the way it enabled him not only to get more people in the picture but also to cram the frame, so to speak, with the space between them)
Google does it. Amazon does it. Walmart does it. And, as news reports last week made clear, the United States government does it. Does what? Uses “big data” analysis of the swelling flood of data that is being generated and stored about virtually every aspect of our lives to identify patterns of behavior and make correlations and predictive assessments. Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argue that big data analytics are revolutionizing the way we see and process the world — they even compare its consequences to those of the Gutenberg printing press. And in this volume they give readers a
The relationship between modern celebrities and their greatest fans is rather like the relationship that once existed between cops and robbers in the movies. (And in life, if you believe the Mafia lore.) Classic cops and robbers have the same DNA: they understand each other, because, at some basic level, they are the same people. The Bling Ring (as the Los Angeles Times called them) already possessed many of the items they were stealing, but what they craved was proximity and identification.
Elliott Holt’s You Are One of Them is a novel of grand and intimate scope, artfully balanced between the political and personal. The book’s narrative satisfies on multiple levels, as both a compelling character study and a psychological thriller with a ferociously intelligent ending. It also captures the tenor of the 1980s and ’90s, portraying, in detail that will resonate with readers who grew up in the era, the waning tensions and paranoia of the Cold War, the illusory trappings of American prosperity (Greed is good, sayeth Gordon Gekko), and the early rise of the Internet and other technologies that
Once in a while a book appears that’s so bad you want it to be a satire. If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudopoetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking “dirty talk,” you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell.
“What we do is secret.” That motto is scrawled more than once in the fanzines assembled in The Riot Grrrl Collection, this first-ever collection of writings and artwork from Riot Grrrl, the early ’90s punk-based feminist movement whose critique of boy-centrism in music and art circles was co-opted by the Spice Girls, then resurrected by Pussy Riot.
