There’s much at stake in The First Book. The first-time author wishes to make a good impression and, if things work out, to seduce the reader. The reader, for his or her part, hopes to love the book but looks for signs of weakness. Both parties are blind—there is no track record, no laurels; there is no critical lens. The writer covers up the bumps and bruises. The reader looks for poise and power.
Miguel Syjuco’s wildly entertaining “Ilustrado” was the recipient of the 2008 Man Asia Literary Prize. Such awards, as readers know, all too often go to earnest, high-minded, politically correct and rather dull books. In this case, I picture the judges, weary from perusing massive laser-printed works of heart-sinking merit, suddenly rejoicing at the discovery of a manuscript as engaging as this one, absolutely assured in its tone, literary sophistication and satirical humo
If you are looking to discover what singer Van Morrison was like growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, or what gossip former bandmates have about him, don’t look for it in When That Rough God Goes Riding. Cultural critic Greil Marcus of Berkeley doesn’t write biographies as much as ruminations. His book’s subtitle, “Listening to Van Morrison,” provides a key to his purpose here: listening to, and pondering, Morrison’s music.
Stanley Cavell grew up in Atlanta and Sacramento, California. He was a student in music at UC Berkeley and Juilliard before studying philosophy at UCLA and completing a Ph.D. at Harvard University. His eighteen books range from treatments of individual writers (Wittgenstein, Emerson, Shakespeare) to studies in aesthetics, film, and religion. Through his writing and almost half century of teaching—six years at Berkeley, thirty-five at Harvard—Cavell has become “one of the great philosophers,” as Jay Parini wrote in the Hudson Review in 1988. Cavell served for many years as president of the American Philosophical Association, and among his numerous awards
“I have been a kind of undercover person from birth almost,” says one of the two main characters in Michael Gruber’s “The Good Son,” “and I am bound to offend those who like neat classifications.” Not an improbable statement, coming from a major player in a spy thriller — if “The Good Son” can be accurately described as a spy thriller. It is that, and yet it’s a lot more.
For Rupert Murdoch, buying the Wall Street Journal wasn’t just business; it was personal. That’s because with the Journal under his control, Murdoch could finally realize his dream of destroying the New York Times. Murdoch, who started his multibillion-dollar media empire with a couple of Australian papers, has long fought against what he’s pegged as the monolithic media establishment—a self-important, liberal elite, bred in the Ivy League and at top journalism schools on the coasts. And believing that inherited wealth can lead to complacency in business and in the newsroom, Murdoch has always been wary of those who have inherited
On the back of the book is printed in large capital letters, “THIS IS A STORY”. It’s worth remembering that emphatic statement as you read the book. This is not a speculation about the beginnings of Christianity, a claim to have uncovered the real, suppressed history of Jesus. It is a fable through which Philip Pullman reflects on Jesus, on the tensions and contradictions of organised religion – and indeed on the nature of storytelling.
“I consider only the Mohammedans to be safe. All the others I consider unsafe,” Adolf Hitler proclaimed at his headquarters one day in 1942. “I don’t see any risk if one actually sets up pure Mohammedan units.” The Soviet Union, Hitler’s enemy, had a population of millions of Muslims who felt their religious and nationalist aspirations were being quashed by the Communist state. The führer’s idea was simple: exploit this anger for military and propaganda gain. Like much else about the Nazis’ expansion eastward, these plans would crumble. However, once the United States emerged from World War II and geared
“Tell a dream, lose a reader,” the saying goes, but Brad Watson ignored that advice in his splendidly dream-laden novel, The Heaven of Mercury, and watched it become a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. Watson’s dreams work because they avoid twee mysticism or kitsch — they’re made of reality with a slight shift, as if his characters phase just out of the earthly plane, then return with visions that seem logical, essential to our understanding of the story.
In his 2007 book, The Discovery of France, historian Graham Robb argued that the idea of a homogeneous people called “the French” was a myth carefully constructed to bring political and cultural unity to a “vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations.” Now, in his new work, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris, Robb depicts a Paris that is similarly “a composite place built up over the ages, a picture book of superimposed transparencies,” where “even the quietest street is crowded with adventures.”
The intimate lives of writers have always had a special attraction for readers, perhaps because we imagine that people who can shape ideas and arrange scenes on the page should be able to offer us some special insight into how to order our messy off-the-page lives. This has rarely been proven the case—writers often seem less, rather than more, gifted at the mechanics of everyday existence; all the same it has not stemmed our interest in finding out what Sylvia said to Ted or why Simone pimped for Jean-Paul.
When Hitler had conquered nearly all of Europe, Winston Churchill resisted the considerable pressure to make terms with Germany. Britons take a justifiable pride in their most famous Prime Minster’s foresight, and his achievements during the war that followed.
It has become a commonplace to say, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, that ‘we are all Keynesians now.’ If this is so, then Keynes’s great biographer, Robert Skidelsky, should have much to say about the recession, its causes and the appropriate cures. And so indeed he does. I share with Skidelsky the view that, while most of the blame for the crisis should reside with those in the financial markets, who did such a poor job both in allocating capital and in managing risk (their key responsibilities), a considerable portion of it lies with the economics profession.
Japanese Noh theater would seem to be an odd subject for William T. Vollmann, were it not for the fact that nothing human is alien to him. Indeed, he is one of the very few writers among us about whom the latter statement can be made without irony. His appetite for all human behavior is so truly omnivorous that the book’s subtitle—Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with some thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines—is not an exaggeration.
In September 2008, at the age of eighty-five, José Saramago was feeling restless. “Here’s a job for you”, said his wife. “Write a blog”. And so the 1998 Nobel laureate began to record his reflections on an almost daily basis, jubilantly freed from the constraints of fiction and awed by the “infinite page” of the internet: “that place where I can most express myself according to my desires”. So close has this blog since become to Saramago’s heart that a review of it in a Portuguese newspaper caused him to break a vow, “which hitherto I have fulfilled to the
Since emerging some thirty years ago as a protagonist and central thinker of Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has been many poets to many people—or so he would have us believe. As he proclaims in the 1999 poem “Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold”:
My first visit to New Orleans didn’t happen until 2002, in my early thirties, shamefully late in life for someone who likes to eat as much as I do. What I found when I arrived, at least culinarily speaking, did not disappoint: the roast-beef and gravy po’boys on Magazine Street, the oysters as big as my palm at the Acme Oyster Bar, the crabmeat-covered everything at Galatoire’s. I also discovered something else—New Orleans is in many ways a small town, albeit one that acts like a metropolis during Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras. After a few days there, I began
When David Lipsky meets David Foster Wallace, it’s 1996, Infinite Jest has just been released, and Wallace is the most famous literary writer in America. The author is also using a Barney the Purple Dinosaur towel as a bedroom curtain in his Illinois home. On the wall is a poster of Alanis Morissette. “If by some paradox,” he tells Lipsky, a novelist who’s there to profile him for Rolling Stone, “this whole fuss could get me some kind of even just like a five-minute cup of tea with her, that would be more than reward enough.” Later, Wallace will confess
“Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters,” quipped Clement Greenberg, the legendary critic of modernism, to Rosalind Krauss, his most brilliant disciple. It was 1974: Krauss had made a name for herself writing on Minimalism in the pages of Artforum but would soon leave the magazine to cofound October. As promised by the journal’s name, a revolution in art history was afoot.
Absolute quiet isn’t a problem for most of us. Rather, it’s the barrage of modern life that makes it so we cannot abide long silences when they happen to come our way. We arrive home and switch on the television, even if no one watches, especially if we’re alone. We turn up our iPods to at least control our sonic environment. We lull children to sleep with white-noise machines—devices that, it turns out, make the young liable to distraction and slowed language processing.
