“I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name,” writes Alex Ross in the opening chapter of his new book, Listen to This. “It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today . . . [the] phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype.”
My friend Tom invited me to visit him in Tbilisi. He’s a fearless, openhearted man, an international aid worker who had put in hard time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Now, he was the head of child protection for UNICEF in Georgia. “You can stay at my apartment, I’ve plenty of room. It’ll more than cancel out the price of the ticket to get here.” To entice me further he quoted a piece of graffito he had seen scrawled on the side of a building that afternoon: NO GOD, ONLY KINGS. “That’s the kind of place this is. Original. Enigmatic.
What do you call a revival that never ends? Over the past two decades, publishers have added three biographies of H. L. Mencken—Mencken: A Life by Fred Hobson, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken by Terry Teachout, and Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers—to the three or four that had already been released. Over that same period, Mencken, who died in 1956 at the age of seventy-five, has been more prolific than many living authors. We’ve seen the release of a volume of memoirs (My Life as Author and Editor), a journal Mencken kept between 1930
The jacket copy of Leslie Brody’s new biography Irrepressible will tell you that Jessica Mitford, or Decca, as she was nicknamed, was “yoked to every important event for nearly all of the twentieth century.” This is a bit much, but it’s true that Mitford witnessed some of the century’s major events. Even as a teenager in 1932, “using a diamond ring, Decca and [her sister] Unity etched symbols of their political affiliations into the window of the room they shared at the top of the house—Unity drew a swastika; Decca a hammer and sickle.” The Mitford family’s inner turmoil—with most
The French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945) once said that he could never write a novel because sooner or later he would find himself setting down such a sentence as “The marquise went out at five o’clock.” Why did the marquise leave at five? he wondered. Why not at six or seven? In fact, why did she go out at all? And why a “marquise”? Why not a duchess or a washerwoman? The arbitrary nature of narrative devices irked Valéry; they pretended to an authority that was, at bottom, a sham. They invited us to treat mere fancy as hard fact.
In 1974, two years (or two years and one week, to be more precise) before Georges Perec initiated Life: A User’s Manual, his 700-page magnum opus to the fictional 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, the Oulipian mathematician dedicated a rainy, October weekend to musing in Paris’s real-life Place Saint-Sulpice. Armed with pen and paper (and likely a never-ending supply of Gitanes), Perec attempted to notate every person, object, event, action, and atmospheric modulation as they appeared from varying locations on the square. “What happens,” Perec asks, “when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds?”
It is no accident that the prologue to David Grossman’s new novel, To the End of the Land, takes place in a fever ward. As the stories unfold, the reader discovers that fever is not just a symptom of physical illness. It becomes a description of the existential state of Israel.
Everything you think you know about James Frey is wrong. You’re wrong about Eliot Spitzer, too, and Linda Tripp, and any number of those nutty and libidinous rogues in our public pillories. According to Laura Kipnis’s coruscating new study of scandal, what we talk about when we talk about transgression is in a terrible muddle. We can’t explain why one public figure’s infidelities outrage us while another’s are ignored; why some can rehabilitate their reputations while others are permanent pariahs. “We lack any real theory of scandal,” writes Kipnis, whose taxonomy of misbehavior leads us “like latter-day Darwins in the
James Ellroy is nothing if not self-aware. Throughout his career, the pulp-crime master has spared himself no quarter, cultivating an alarmingly frank public persona as a creep and a curmudgeon, a speed freak and shoplifter–turned–snarling and sober sexual obsessive. In his new memoir, The Hilliker Curse, he unpacks the latter with the profane detail that is his stock-in-trade, crafting a lean, mean portrait of the artist as a young Peeping Tom—and the old, paranoid perv he grows into.
The narrator of Emma Donoghue’s “Room” is a 5-year-old boy who leads a busy life. “We have thousands of things to do every morning,” Jack tells the reader, and he seems to mean it. Jack is a smart, eager kid with a great imagination and unlimited energy. But he and his mother have been trapped in the 11-by-11-foot room of the title since the day he was born.
The fat kid who plays the French horn. The mentally stunted drug dealer. The suck-up, runner-up for valedictorian. The boy who lights his fart into “a magnificent plume of flame…a cold and beautiful enchantment that for an instant bathes the locker room in unearthly light.” These are a few typical characters from Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, a sprawling homage to adolescence, string theory, roofies, wet knickers, and unrequited love. Set in Ireland at the Seabrook Catholic School for Boys, the book features a cast of fourteen-year-olds who have populated classrooms for centuries.
On April 5, 1946, the USS Missouri, “the world’s most famous battleship,” sailed up the Bosporus and docked in Istanbul. President Harry Truman had dispatched his triumphant vessel to deliver the body of Turkish diplomat Münir Ertegün (the father, as it happens, of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet)—and, more important, to secure an alliance with Turkey at the beginning of the cold war. At the time, the Turks had few friends in the world. Only thirty years earlier, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, had called the Ottomans “a human cancer.” When the victorious Americans appeared on Istanbul’s shores, the
On July 24, 1926, Samuel Steward, one day past his seventeenth birthday, got word that Rudolph Valentino had just checked in to the best hotel in Columbus, Ohio. Grabbing his autograph book, he made his way to the hotel and knocked on Valentino’s door. The actor appeared, wearing only a towel, and after signing his autograph asked whether there was anything else the boy wanted. “Yes,” said Steward, “I’d like to have you.”
In an interview posted on her website, the novelist Cathi Unsworth sits in a cloud of cigarette smoke, earnestly leaning forward, unsmiling, answering a question directly, with detail and passion. She looks like Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s 1953 The Big Heat: the picture where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee in her face. On camera, Unsworth is almost flinching against herself, as if the trials she inflicts on her characters are swirling around her, along with her own smoke.
Pity the poor bachelor who can’t find a decent suit to wear courting before autumn comes, because if he doesn’t find a wife by then he’ll be forced to work at the candy mint factory, or worse. Pity everyone else, too—the garbage-pickers, the soldiers, even the police—living in this world where doubt must be avoided and individuality is stamped flatter than a snake at a square dance.
David Abram, ecologist and author of Spell of the Sensuous (1996), is the hierophant of a group best described as environmental ecstatics—nature writers with a primary interest not in studying or saving the earth, but in reveling in its metaphysical powers. In his new book, Becoming Animal, Abram is on a particularly complicated, mystical, and almost messianic mission: He wants to reclaim “creatureness”—our animal senses and subjectivity—in a society in thrall to the “cult of the expertise” and the tyranny of machines. He hopes to reintroduce us to a pungent, unpredictable world of “resplendent weirdness.”
“On the day I turned twenty-five,” Julia Wertz tells us at the beginning of “Drinking at the Movies,” her charming graphic memoir, “I came to consciousness at 3 a.m. in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat in Brooklyn, New York, eating Cracker Jacks in my pajamas. … To understand how I got there, we need to go back one year… “
In 1943, Hannah Arendt reviewed the memoirs of Stefan Zweig, one of the leading literary figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Like the vast majority of those figures—the playwrights and journalists, psychoanalysts and art collectors who made the Austro-Hungarian capital perhaps the most sophisticated city in the world—Zweig was Jewish. But this Jewish golden age was always haunted by the pervasive anti-Semitism of Austrian society, and it ended, of course, in catastrophe.
At the heart of Danielle Dutton’s Sprawl is a lavish, endless list of domestic objects: water pitchers, sweaters, cakes on cake stands, petunias in a terra-cotta pot. Borrowing techniques from both fiction, poetry, and visual art (particularly photography), the book not only infuses each object, be it a juice glass or a paper napkin, with a Vermeeresque glow but arranges it into part of a verbal still life. The result? A fresh take on suburbia, one of reverence and skepticism.
A decade ago Emily Fox Gordon made her debut with “Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy,’’ a memoir developed from an essay included in her fourth and latest book, “Book of Days: Personal Essays.’’This new collection of her work over the intervening years is stunning, not only in the precision and beauty of the language, but also in the author’s willingness to revisit events in her life — even ones she’s already written about — and to change her mind about them. Though each essay stands alone, the book as a whole traces the path of a
