The great are a pretty mixed lot, especially in politics. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were among the great, each in his own monstrous way. Churchill was, too, for both good and evil, and Roosevelt as well, though mainly he was lucky. De Gaulle may or may not deserve to be included in such company, but he certainly behaved as if he was sure he did.
When Ishmael Reed gets celebrated these days, now that he’s well past age seventy, it’s usually for the work he did decades ago. The novels that enjoy broadest critical approval are Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), two comic and surreal historical revisions. Reed was hailed as the great African-American among our homegrown postmoderns (Thomas Pynchon gave him a tip of the cap in Gravity’s Rainbow), if not our foremost black novelist. Esteem like that no longer flutters around his name, but the author himself was the first to shoo it away. He derided such praise as
Thomas De Quincey’s “The English Mail-Coach,” an essay that begins as a jaunty paean to the English postal system and ends in drug-fueled nightmare, appeared, in 1849, in Blackwood’s Magazine. That is to say, a reader picking up the general-interest journal would have plunged into what appeared to be a winking disquisition on mail-coaches only to come, many pages later, to a subheading titled “Dream-Fugue: Founded on the Preceding Theme of Sudden Death,” at which point he would be firmly planted in an opium addict’s waking fever. The mail-coaches of his youth warranted lengthy description, wrote De Quincey, because they
In the past decade, a handful of writers have added compelling twists to the classic immigration novel, adding new and unexpected layers to tales of newcomers in new lands. Jeffrey Eugenides, for example, wrote about a hermaphrodite immigrant in Middlesex; in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the protagonist had a fantastic imagination and used an unexpected language infused with Spanish and video game slang. Now comes David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, an immigration novel in which the characters don’t actually immigrate.
“The train climbed the steel trestle high over the forest of red and brown buildings that tumbled across the landscape,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in his 1958 account of life among Brooklyn’s fighting teen gangs, The Shook-Up Generation. “From the platform . . . I looked down in the tenement back yards, the rubbish piles and bright paper tatters brightened by wash lines of blue and pink, purple and yellow. Here and there I saw the scraggly green of Brooklyn back-yard trees dwarfed by soot and sickened by cinders.”
The first four children of the short-story writer Andre Dubus—he had two more, much later, with his third wife—were all born on Marine Corps bases beginning in 1958. Suzanne was the oldest, then Andre III, his brother Jeb, and finally Nicole. Dubus was a Marine Corps officer and rose to the rank of captain. Some of his time was served on the aircraft carrier Ranger in the Far East. After six years of service he resigned his commission in order to become what he had always wanted to be, a writer, and was accepted in the Writers’ Workshop, the celebrated
It’s rare that anything of substance comes out of the Aspen Ideas Festival, that annual orgy of techno-triumphalism and political self-seriousness, the bastard child of Davos and TED. But something odd happened when Eric Schmidt, until recently the CEO of Google, appeared at the high-powered mogul gathering in 2009 to speak about Google and the future of the American economy. After Schmidt addressed the crisis in the American banking system and the need for improved regulation, Brian Lehrer, the host of a talk show on WNYC in New York, walked up to the microphone. “Is there ever a point at
Ancient egypt has been misunderstood since Herodotus put pen to papyrus in the fifth century B.C., though its appeal has never flagged. Exhibitions of Egyptian artifacts still draw large crowds at museums, and the “documentaries” on cable channels continue to flood in. But much of this attention feeds into an idea that Egypt is “other” and “exotic”—a changeless, mysterious world of tombs, temples and sorcerers. Hollywood is guilty of promoting this image, but so are scholars, who are prone to emphasize mummies and royal tombs to the exclusion of topics such as agricultural production, social organization and, broader still, economic
I haven’t had sex since starting Deborah Lutz’s book, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. Now that I’ve finished, I’m still in recovery. It’s only fair, you say, to look for other causes, but, I’m sorry, the correlation is too strong. These interwoven tales of Victorian high jinks include some piquant stories: Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up his poems from his wife’s grave, Algernon Swinburne scurrying off to be “birched” by prostitutes near Regent’s Park, Richard Burton (the explorer) trying to wake the British out of their sexless sleep. But there’s a problem.
My life has been shaped by the aftermath of a revolution gone bad. I was born in 1979 to Iranian revolutionaries, and when we were growing up my mother characterized the days after the Shah’s ouster as generally euphoric. Many protesters felt that finally democracy was close, she said. After the revolution but before everything changed, people gathered in the street—to speak on top of soapboxes, argue over ideas, and chart the country’s path forward.
This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers. It is written by well-regarded professors (one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it.
My dear Rosa,
“Modigliani should have been the father of a family. He was kind, constant, correct, and considerate: a bourgeois Jew.” The English painter C.R.W. Nevinson, who rendered this verdict, knew full well that these were not the first adjectives that would spring to most people’s minds to describe Amedeo Modigliani.
In 1990, as the culture wars that had already maimed Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz (not, as recent events at the National Portrait Gallery made clear, for the last time) were hitting a fevered crescendo, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts vetoed four performance grants. One of the nixed awards was for Karen Finley, a New York–based performance artist whose works often involved nudity and foodstuffs in dynamic interaction. She and her fellow refuseniks sued, finally losing in the Supreme Court in 1998.
Ronald Reagan dominated his era as no president had since Roosevelt and as no president has again. Today, he’s endlessly lionized as the man who pulled the country out of its economic death spiral and won the cold war for the free world. Is it possible to produce a useful political history of the 1980s while writing the decade’s central political figure out of it? Two new books more or less do just that, by consigning Reagan to the margins of the main story—one by design and the other coincidentally. For casual students of the political history of the late
We haven’t always put a high premium on originality in writing. Alexander Pope defined “true wit” as “Nature to advantage dress’d, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”; in other words, the best poet makes memorable lines out of what everybody already knows. It was the Romantics, in the nineteenth century, who made the expression of original personal experience the highest value. They gave us the idea that the poet should say something new, and that the poem should bear the authentic stamp of its maker: (copyright) Shelley, and no one else.
One of the things I’ve always noticed about movies about writers is that nobody knows what writing actually looks like. Usually the author is shown failing to write, balling up pieces of paper and throwing them in the wastebasket. I remember a movie about Lillian Hellman where she actually threw her typewriter out the window. I think language is the problem. Since our tools are the same ones most people use (language, a computer), there’s a suspicion we might be doing nothing (except maybe being crazy—remember Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining), and then a book appears like a secret
The most surprising thing about Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, is that a lot of it is boring. How could that be? Donald Rumsfeld was not boring; his life was not boring; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were and are not boring. What other contemporary public figure attained brief sex-symbol status at the age of sixty-nine, drew mad vitriol from hippies and hawks alike, and had lawsuits filed against them on everything from habeas corpus to torture to sexual harassment in the military, even as poets, novelists, and comics riffed passionately on their words and lives? Yet Rumsfeld
For a certain swath of American female thirty-somethings, the literary thriller comes with an odd set of associations. In addition to the windswept heaths of Wuthering Heights and Manderley, such books will likely conjure the pine-lined hiking trails of New Mexico, the fiercely policed social boundaries of classrooms and high school cafeterias, and beachy redoubts where teenagers would do well to avoid slippery black rocks.
When T.C. Boyle swaggered onto the literary scene in the 1980s, brandishing flamboyantly bizarre short stories in one hand and wildly satirical novels like Water Music and Budding Prospects in the other, the exuberance of his sentences was often more impressive than the depth of his characterizations.
