In his prime, author Knut Hamsun wrote beautifully, poetically, and savagely. And yet the author, personally and politically, was a monster. He berated his friends and cheated on his wives; he could be horrible to his children. Famously, he was a fascist. Less famously, he was a career racist, who allied himself early with the Nazis.
At the beginning of 2000 Little, Brown published “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. It was an auspicious time for both the calendar industry and the publishing world. Mr. Gladwell had a deductive style and a teacherly simplicity that would make him one of the new century’s most frequently quoted and widely imitated writers of nonfiction. He went on to write “Blink” and “Outliers,” and all three books went to the top of best-seller lists. What can this tell us about Mr. Gladwell or about the people who read him?
Nick Cave, post-punk’s self-styled dark prince, has long walked the razor’s edge between balladry and literature. Beginning as early as 1983 with the release of The Birthday Party’s “The Bad Seed” EP, which featured the song “Swampland,” whose mad visionary of a narrator prefigures Euchrid Euchrow, the central character in Cave’s not unaccomplished 1989 Southern gothic pastiche And the Ass Saw the Angel, and continuing with The Bad Seeds’ moody, heroin-haunted fourth and fifth albums, “Your Funeral, My Trial” (1986) and “Tender Prey,” (1988) that showcase, respectively, tales of moribund, carnival nags and convicted killers who may or may not
This week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg used choice language in describing the state of play at the World Trade Center site. Over and against those who complain that the administration has been sitting on its hands for much of the last eight years, Bloomberg demurred, “Larry [Silverstein, the developer] has everybody by the proverbials—he really does.”
Only now, with a half-century of my life already over, have I finally learned whom to turn to for a good potboiler in my next wasting sickness!
After his scrappy and occasionally amusing head-banger memoir Fargo Rock City hit stores in 2001, Chuck Klosterman soon morphed from bucolic hair-metal apologist to city-slicker pop anthropologist: The native North Dakotan moved to New York and become the voice of anti-elitism at elite print-media juggernauts such as Spin, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. This privileged position required him to dive deeper for salvageable meaning in the Dumpsters of popular culture, even while continuing to reject anything reeking of “alternative” exclusivity.
For two years, Rich Benjamin insinuated himself in some of the fastest-growing communities in America: “Whitopias,” places in Georgia, Idaho, Utah—and even parts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side—where white people are currently migrating in massive numbers. Searching for what these “refugees of diversity” are running from and towards, he attended churches and poker games, posed as a prospective house buyer, hosted potlucks, and even participated in a three-day retreat with white separatists. It’s a topical and conceptually sensitive project brimming with promise, especially given Benjamin’s self-professed boredom with the black-white divide (Benjamin himself is black). The 26,909-mile journey recounted in
Mashing up genres, switching historical periods, and unfolding tales with supple and convincing omniscience, Possession author A.S. Byatt continues to challenge and entertain her readers.
Often praised for her lack of sentimentality, Rachel Sherman doesn’t hesitate to capture her characters’ weird, unbecoming thoughts. She doesn’t sugarcoat adolescent experience, nor does she avert her eyes from painful or explicitly sexual scenes. And sex isn’t the only subject rawly depicted in her first novel, Living Room: grief, cruelty, and claustrophobia are all depicted with great skill.
What to do with all the empty white space that drifts over the 733 pages and nearly 200 fictions of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis? Make origami, maybe. Like Don DeLillo, who drafted Underworld at the pace of one paragraph per sheet of paper, Lydia Davis is as much sculptor as writer.
During a recent reading for her new book, The Importance of Being Iceland, Eileen Myles observed that pitching articles to magazines and museums left her with copious work to collect into a book “about how I’ve made a living.” The Importance of Being Iceland, while serving as a tongue-in-cheek record of these endeavors, is also a series of personal ruminations about what it means to be a poet at large in the world. “The poet is like the earth’s shadow,” Myles writes in “Universal Cycle” (1998). “The sun moves and the poet writes something down.”
James Ellroy’s astonishing Underworld USA Trilogy … is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.
“My father may have killed a man.’’ So opens Stephen Elliott’s riveting new book, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder. It’s the sort of line in which Elliott specializes: nakedly manipulative and all but impossible to resist.
In the introduction to her biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lori D. Ginzberg, a professor of history and women’s studies at Penn State, confesses that her previous writing has focused on “more ordinary women.” Perhaps that is what allowed Ginzberg to write an accessible, if slim, portrait of the pioneering women’s rights activist.
In June, Cass R. Sunstein’s confirmation as Barack Obama’s nominee for regulatory czar was hindered by Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss, who told online congressional newspaper The Hill, “[Sunstein] has said that animals ought to have the right to sue folks.” Chambliss was apparently referring to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, a book Sunstein edited in 2004, in which he argued that private citizens should be able to defend animals in court. However, when Chambliss’s statement was posted, Sunstein’s nuanced legal thinking was subject to distortion by bloggers and commentators, many of whom took his argument to illogical extremes.
I can’t remember the first time I read Mercè Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves. It might have been when I was 13, living with my family in the high-rise suburbs of Madrid. It might have been when I was 17, back in Madrid with my mother for a few weeks in a sweltering rented room. Or it might have been when I was 19, on my own in the city, sharing an apartment near the train station with four South American girls.
We normally think of angels as emissaries from God, incandescent beings that might be mistaken for aliens, or sentimental covers on Hallmark cards. They’re perceived as the good guys, indicated by their everpresent accessory of the halo, practically a synonym for saintliness. But Chris Adrian intends to change that.
Every aging poet seems to write a book confronting his or her own mortality. By the time they do, many have already fallen into a rut, but John Koethe’s philosophical and wistful Ninety-fifth Street is his best book yet. In these accessible and surprisingly powerful poems, Koethe looks back at his youth, his encounters with his literary heroes and his evolution as a poet himself. “That’s what poetry is,” he writes, “a way to live through time, / And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back.”
A man dies under mysterious circumstances. A second man is called in to solve the mystery. But the second man fails to heed the implicit warnings left by the first man and soon tumbles into the rabbit hole. He is in grave danger. He solves the crime. Stasis is returned; life, of a sort, goes on. These are the old bones on which Colin Harrison fills out Risk, his marvelously compact seventh novel.
We live in noise. The world is a booming, rustling, buzzing place to begin with (though many of us have shut out nature’s clamor), and to that we have added every conceivable vibration of our own making and every possible means of assault, whether it’s the vast, thrumming climate-controlling systems of our sealed buildings or the tiny earbuds nestled against our cochleae. What chance does quiet have against all this?
