Previous Issues Archives
Issue 17 Fall 2009
Features
From the Editors: On the Right Way to Write Criticism
Wherein we do something we have never yet attempted: we direct our Editorial Energies against our own publication.
Horacio Castellanos and the New Political Novel
Something strange is happening to the political novel. In Latin America it’s becoming just the novel, and never so clearly as in Horacio Castellanos Moya.
The Right to Write About It: Literature, After Katrina
How do we decide who owns the right to write about Hurricane Katrina?
When a Biography Is Not a Biography: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys
The new biography of Jean Rhys goes too far, argues Lauren Elkin.
Words Are Living Tissue: The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Often compared to Kafka, and just as often declared unclassifiable, Clarice Lispector was one of the 20th century’s major authors. Leora Skolkin-Smith reads her career through one of her greatest novels.
Citizen of Literature: Dubravka Ugrešić
In fiction, essays, and now myths, Dubravka Ugrešić has mapped out a unique literary territory. But what does it have to do with Ugrešić’s own geographical birthplace?
The Limits of Human Memory: On Proust and Javier Marías
Two writers with a similar idea of time and memory reach very different conclusions.
From Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia
We serialize a chapter from the forthcoming translation of a Polish master.
From The Subversive Scribe by Suzanne Jill Levine
What’s in a name? Quite a lot when it’s the translation of a novel’s title.
Launching a School of “Creative Criticism”
There is a better way to write criticism. J.C. Hallman explains.
Reviews
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo
ShareWonderful World, Javier Calvo (trans. Mara Faye Lethem). Harper. 480pp, $27.99.
Early on in Wonderful World, Javier Calvo’s sprawling comic novel set in the seamier and sillier reaches of Barcelona’s criminal underworld, we meet the minor character Pavel, a low-level Russian thug who experiences great difficulty putting his avowed Rastafarian beliefs into practice. “He knows that [...]
Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty
ShareHiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, Tracy Daugherty. St Martin’s Press. 581pp, $35.00.
Unlike any other form of nonfiction writing, the literary biography is routinely asked to justify its own existence. The genre’s subjects are of interest for what they wrote, obviously, so skeptics ask why we need still more words to illuminate the person’s [...]
The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch
ShareThe Mighty Angel, Jerzy Pilch (trans. Bill Johnston). Open Letter. 155pp, $15.95.
Originally published in 2000, available now in a seamless translation by Bill Johnston, Jerzy Pilch’s novel The Mighty Angel is as entertaining and engaging as it is possible to be while candidly revealing the lurid charm at the heart of alcohol addiction.
Pilch’s narrator is [...]
Running Away by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
ShareRunning Away, Jean Philippe Toussaint (trans. Matthew B. Smith). Dalkey Archive Press. 120pp, $12.95.
The narrators of Toussaint’s early novels The Bathroom and Camera seek a state of inertia as a place where the noise of modern life falls away, letting them most clearly experience their own thoughts. By contrast, in Toussaint’s latest novel, Running Away, [...]
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
ShareNocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf. 240pp, $25.00.
Were it not for the fact that Kazuo Ishiguro’s six novels all share a fundamental concern with the way that people actively create the self they present to the world—expressed in each novel through tight first-person narration—it would be easy to think of him as two different writers struggling within [...]
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
ShareThe Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf. 224pp, $24.95.
The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, just thirty-one years old, has won an extraordinary reputation—along with the Orange Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship—on the strength of her first two novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun.
The Thing Around Your Neck, her first collection [...]
Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon
ShareLove and Obstacles, Aleksandar Hemon. Riverhead. 224pp, $25.95.
The narrators in Aleksandar Hemon’s fourth book, Love and Obstacles, a collection of short stories, slide along a continuum between poetry and prose. These Siamese-sibling narrators begin as adolescents; they are sturm und drang–drenched poets lost to, from, and in a hazy reality–backdrop that Hemon switches out from [...]
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
ShareInherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon. Penguin. 368pp, $27.95.
With his seventh novel, Thomas Pynchon proves he hasn’t lost his knack for rendering California as it existed during the 1960s. Pynchon first took on California in The Crying of Lot 49, set in the Golden State in 1964; his 1990 novel, Vineland, though set mostly in California in [...]
Imperial by William T. Vollmann
ShareImperial. William T. Vollmann. Viking. 1334pp, $55.00.
In the first chapter of Imperial we find William T. Vollmann on the filthy, shit- and trash-filled New River (a “reeking brown cloaca”), sweating in a 110+ degree temperature, rowed in a cheap rubber raft by a Mexican who has never been in a boat in his life. Water [...]
News from the Empire by Fernando Del Paso
ShareNews from the Empire, Fernando Del Paso (trans. Alfonso Gonzalez and Stella T. Clark). Dalkey Archive Press. 880pp, $18.95.
If there wasn’t so much fiction in News from the Empire, it could be called a work of history. In fact, the focus of this broad work is history itself, as well as the many unrecorded lives [...]
Little Fingers by Filip Florian
ShareLittle Fingers, Filip Florian (trans. Alistair Ian Blyth). Harcourt. 208pp, $24.00.
In the early 1990s, Filip Florian was working as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe in Bucharest when human bones were unearthed at a construction site in the city. Universally presumed to be relics from Communist crimes, the bones turned out to be centuries-old casualties [...]
The Silence Room by Sean O’Brien
ShareThe Silence Room, Sean O’Brien. Carcanet Press. 202pp, $13.95.
The Silence Room is the debut short story collection by English poet and critic Sean O’Brien. The book is a mixed bag of shallow entertainments, unsuccessful experiments, and a few, perhaps eight, strong stories—and a couple of these were truly magnificent. O’Brien is an incredibly talented writer, [...]
The Father and the Foreigner by Giancarlo De Cataldo
ShareThe Father and the Foreigner, Giancarlo De Cataldo (trans. Ann Goldstein). Europa Editions. 160 pp., $15.00.
In Italy, crime stories are known as gialli, after the trademark yellow covers of the Mondadori series, which first appeared in 1929. Although Mussolini’s government encouraged its early growth—mostly translations of English and American writers of the time with a [...]
The Bun Field by Amanda Vahamaki and Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell
ShareBooks covered in this dual review:
• The Bun Field, Amanda Vahamaki. Drawn and Quarterly. 80pp, $12.95.
• Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories, Gabrielle Bell. Drawn and Quarterly. 112pp, $19.95.
The Bun Field
The Finnish artist Amanda Vahamaki is a relative newcomer to U.S. comics, having been published here only in the Drawn and Quarterly Showcase #5. [...]
The Feline Plague by Maja Novak
ShareThe Feline Plague, Maja Novak (trans. Maja Visenjak-Limon). North Atlantic Books. 248pp, $15.95.
No prescription for a healthy life can be followed, he mused. At best, you choose your method of collapse—and while we go to hell as individuals, our young state, with its market-driven democracy and small businesses we’re so proud of, is turning into [...]
Said and Done by James Morrison
ShareSaid and Done, James Morrison. Black Lawrence Press. 240pp, $16.00.
Recently trapped at the beach, thinking about the concept of “summer reading”—a sort of intentional intellectual ghetto—flipping through some magazine (People, I think), I ran across a line slagging story collections. The article began with a general nod to the universal unpleasantness of reading them: too [...]
For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide
Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill
Reading Novalis in Montana by Melissa Kwasny
Micrographia by Emily Wilson
Scape by Joshua Harmon
C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems
Issue 16 Summer 2009
Features
From the Editors: On the Proliferation of Posthumous Publication
The dead, we fear, will never have the last word on their unpublished works. So we turn our editorial energies to a bigger question: should they?
Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession
Reaching One’s Promise: What Writers Need to Do to Last Ten Years
In 1938, Cyril Connolly wrote a book about what writers needed to do to see their work last for 10 years. Jeremy Hatch determines if his predictions were accurate, and how contemporary writers might see their work continue to be read.
Notes on Juan Villoro’s El Testigo
Bolaño said he is “opening up the path of the new Spanish novel of the millennium.” Alvaro Enrigue called his book the great Mexican novel. Mauro Javier Cardenas investigates Juan Villoro’s untranslated novel El Testigo.
From El Testigo by Juan Villoro
Janet Frame Reframed
What is the difference between fiction and autobiography? Elizabeth Wadell looks at author Janet Frame’s new posthumous novel, too personal to publish in her lifetime, and considers how it compares to the source material as found in her celebrated autobiography.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Carnival: Caricature in The War of the End of the World
Though the word caricature is often used to disparage poor writing, caricature also has its uses. Travis Godsoe shows how Mario Vargas Llosa uses caricatured characters to create a rich portrait of a unique rebel colony in his novel The War of the End of the World.
From The Museum of Eterna’s Novel
Beyond Neruda: Linking Three of Latin America’s Best Poets
John Herbert Cunningham charts the links between the careers and writings of three of Latin America’s best poets.
Reviews
I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou
ShareI’d Like, Amanda Michalopoulou (trans. Karen Emmerich). Dalkey Archive Press. 144pp, $12.50.
For more on Michalopoulou, I’d Like, and the translation of her works, see George Fragopoulos’s interview with Amanda Michalopoulou and Karen Emmerich, also in Issue 16.
I
Wonderfully polymorphous—is it novel, fictional biography, short story collection, or other?—and incredibly promiscuous in its tones and registers—vacillating with [...]
Secret Son by Laila Lalami
ShareBooks covered in this dual review:
• Secret Son, Laila Lalami. Algonquin Books. 304pp, $23.95.
• Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih (Denys Johnson-Davies trans.). NYRB Classics. 139pp, $14.00.
One modest silver lining in the War on Terror has been the increased Western interest in literature from and about the Islamic, Hindi, and greater Eastern worlds. [...]
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
ShareBooks covered in this dual review:
• Secret Son, Laila Lalami. Algonquin Books. 304pp, $23.95.
• Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih (Denys Johnson-Davies trans.). NYRB Classics. 139pp, $14.00.
(continued from page 1)
It’s not as if Lalami is unaware of how to artfully dramatize and describe these cultural and political issues: just see her informative [...]
The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
ShareThe Foundation Pit, Andrey Platonov (trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson). NYRB Classics. 208pp, $14.95.
A good Sovietologist has shelves packed with books like Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917-1923, Science and Industrialization in the USSR, and Soviet Economic Structure and Performance. However, Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit confronts us with [...]
Tokyo Fiancée by Amélie Nothomb
ShareTokyo Fiancée, Amélie Nothomb (trans. Alison Anderson). Europa Editions. 152pp, $15.00.
Tokyo Fiancée is best-selling Belgian author Amélie Nothomb’s brief, detailed novel about two years she spent in Tokyo while in her early twenties. Ostensibly a story of unrequited love, it is also a love letter to Japanese culture, and a revealing—nearly confessional—self-portrait of the author [...]
Gods and Soldiers by Rob Spillman (editor)
ShareGods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, edited by Rob Spillman. Penguin. 368pp, $16.00.
African literature has been enjoying a boom, or at least a boomlet, in recent years. In his new anthology, Gods and Soldiers, Rob Spillman seeks to capture that phenomenon between two covers.
The boomlet has been dominated—at least for those [...]
Brothers by Yu Hua
ShareBooks covered in this dual review:
• Brothers, Yu Hua (Eileen Chen-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas, trans.). Pantheon. 656pp, $29.95.
• English, Wang Gang (Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan, trans.). Viking Adult. 320pp, $24.95.
It’s a common belief in modern China that the Cultural Revolution ruined society forever. Many argue that before this tumultuous period (which lasted [...]
English by Wang Gang
ShareBooks covered in this dual review:
• Brothers, Yu Hua (Eileen Chen-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas, trans.). Pantheon Press. 656pp, $29.95.
• English, Wang Gang (Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan, trans.). Viking. 320pp, $24.95.
(continued from page 1)
Like Brothers, Wang Gang’s novel, English, also tells the story of a child growing up during the Cultural Revolution, but [...]
And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio
ShareAnd Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers, Gonzalo Celorio (trans. Dick Gerdes). University of Texas Press. 158pp, $19.95.
A walking tour of Mexico City’s historic center provides the scaffolding for And Let the Earth Tremble at its Centers, an impressive first novel from Mexican writer Gonzalo Celorio.
We begin with a hangover. Dr. Juan Manuel [...]
The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
ShareThe Vagrants, Yiyun Li. Random House. 352pp, $25.00.
I have to admit I have recently become addicted to memoirs documenting the harrowing experiences of immigrants fleeing China’s late 20th century political maelstrom. Starting with Zhang Boli’s Escape from China, I went on to read Zhu Xiao Di’s Thirty Years in a Red House, and Kang Zhengguo’s [...]
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
ShareThe Spare Room, Helen Garner. Henry Holt and Company. 175pp, $22.00.
Helen Garner’s The Spare Room opens with the narrator, also named Helen, preparing a room for an impending guest. She puts fresh sheets on the bed, fluffs the pillows, fans out an array of books on a table, clips some greenery to put in a [...]
The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla
ShareThe Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla. Soft Skull. 308pp, $14.95.
Pasha Malla is fond of the deke, and the promise of many head-fakes is implicit in the title of his short story collection, The Withdrawal Method. The title both showcases Malla’s odd sense of humor (contraception never actually appears in the text) and gives readers a hint [...]
The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar
ShareThe Bridge of the Golden Horn, Emine Sevgi Özdamar (trans. Martin Chalmers). Serpent’s Tail. 320pp, $15.95.
Consider Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn a kind of bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young migrant worker as it were. The plot threads are familiar: discontented young woman leaves home to seek her [...]
Tinkers by Paul Harding
ShareTinkers, Paul Harding. Bellevue Literary Press. 192pp, $14.95.
Paul Harding’s Tinkers meticulously examines life and death, its precision often mirroring that of the protagonist as he performs his vocation of repairing clocks. The novel, although slim, packs much detail into its tightly wound prose: three generations of a hard-scrabbled New England family are shared over 191 [...]
A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
ShareA Mind at Peace, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (trans. Erdağ Göknar). Archipelago Press. 450pp, $25.00.
A Mind at Peace, published in 1949 and set in 1938 and 1939, has long been a cornerstone of Turkish literature, a symbol of the nation’s conflict between the modernizing forces of the West and the traditional Ottoman and Turkish cultures. Ahmet [...]
My Floating Mother, City by Kazuko Shiraishi
Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Campbell McGrath
This Nest, Swift Passerine by Dan Beachy-Quick
King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne
Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud by Robert Pinsky (editor)
Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems by Ron Padgett (editor)
The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest by Hadley Haden Guest (editor)
Issue 15 Spring 2009
Features
From the Editors: On the Demise of Publishing, Reading, and Everything Else
Books are commodities, and as we head into the sharpest economic downturn since 1982—indeed, quite possibly since 1932—publishers are feeling the pain. The reactions of many of the industry leaders do not instill confidence, and so we must ask: What’s really dying here?
CONTEST: Win Bookstore Credit at Seminary Co-op’s Online Store
For our spring contest, we’ve joined forces with a 58-year-old Chicago institution: the customer-owned Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Details here.
Crossing the Zone: Mathias Énard’s 517-Page, One-Sentence Train Journey
Published in France in 2008, Zone has already been called a novel of the new century. This one-sentence dissection of a half-century of war and atrocity will be published in English next year. François Monti tells what it’s about, and if it’s worth all the fuss.
Susan Sontag’s Cabinet of Curiosities
Susan Sontag wrote “I write partly in order to change myself; it’s an instrument I use.” Lauren Elkin reads Sontag’s recently published diaries and finds how the writer developed her identity and her style.
Confronting the Murmur in Brian Evenson’s Last Days
Brian Evenson once stated that he writes with an “ethical blankness.” Matt Bell considers how this blankness drags the reader into Evenson’s most recent novel, the dark, noirish Last Days.
Coetzee in the Promised Land
The 1972 novel Promised Land might have been the first “alternate future” book of post-apartheid South Africa. Matthew Cheney shows how it sheds new night on the work of J.M. Coetzee, and of other South African novelists.
Ten Theses on the Nature of Metafiction (And a Parenthetical Review of Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper)
George Fragopoulos argues that in The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia closes the divide between metafiction and realism.
Intro to E-Lit: How Electronic Literature Makes Printed Literature Richer
Electronic literature is commonly seen as an odd offshoot from printed literature. William Patrick Wend shows that e-lit is a rich and thriving art form, and one that has much to say about bounded literature.
Reviews
Girly Man by Charles Bernstein
ShareGirly Man, Charles Bernstein. University of Chicago Press. 186 pp., $15.00.
“I’m only speaking of the San Francisco Language scene; I think New York Language scene was very different.” So said Leslie Scalapino in a May 2007 speech during the Seque Panel “Language Poetry and the Body” titled “History/Memory/Body: Language is the Trace of Being.” [...]
The Alphabet by Ron Silliman
ShareThe Alphabet, Ron Silliman. University of Alabama Press. 1062pp., $39.95.
(continued from page 1)
We will turn our thoughts now to Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet. In Postmodern American Poetry, Paul Hoover provides a brief biography of Silliman:
Born in Pasco, Washington, and raised in Albany, California, Silliman attended San Francisco State University and the University of California at [...]
My Father’s Wives by José Eduardo Agualusa
ShareMy Father’s Wives, José Eduardo Agualusa (trans. Daniel Hahn). Arcadia Books. 364pp.
The third of José Eduardo Agualusa’s novels to be translated into English by Daniel Hahn, His Father’s Lives follows the epistolary novel of colonial Angola, Creole, and the 2004 story of shifting identity and post-revolutionary Angola, The Book of Chameleons. This third book is [...]
Ghosts by Cesar Aira
ShareGhosts, Cesar Aira (trans. Chris Andrews). New Directions. 144pp, $12.95.
Argentinean writer Cesar Aira is the author of more than sixty books, though his novel Ghosts, recently published by New Directions, is only the fourth to be translated into English. The story revolves around a family of squatters living on a construction site where luxury condominiums [...]
Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra
ShareBonsai, Alejandro Zambra. Melville House. 90pp, $13.00.
At one point, Chile was full of bonsais. I don’t know if I liked them, but they had rare beauty, this fragility. . . . At first, the only thing I had in mind was the image of someone who had a bonsai, took care of it, wanted it [...]
Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction
ShareBest of Contemporary Mexican Fiction, Alvaro Uribe and Olivia Sears (eds.). Dalkey Archive Press. 450pp, $15.95.
The preface to Dalkey Archive Press’s Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction begins by warning readers against judging a nation’s fiction by any single anthology, and yet it is hard not to draw some conclusions from this fine collection of short [...]
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
ShareOblomov, Ivan Goncharov (trans. Marian Schwartz). Seven Stories. 576pp, 33.95.
More translations of Russian novels? We’ve done our time with War and Peace, what more do you want? Indeed. In the case of Russian literature, the vaults are still being opened, classics are still being unearthed, and new Russian literary works are still making their way [...]
White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
ShareWhite Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov (trans. Marian Schwartz). Yale Press. 352pp, 27.00.
(continued from page 1)
Mikhail Bulgakov is best known for his Soviet-era satire The Master and Margarita, although he also has the infamous distinction of writing a favorite play of Stalin’s, The Days of the Turbins. This play and Bulgakov’s 1924 debut, White Guard, were both [...]
The Fat Man and Infinity & Other Writings by Antonio Lobo Antunes
ShareThe Fat Man and Infinity & Other Writings, Antonio Lobo Antunes (trans. Margaret Jull Costa). W.W. Norton. 320pp, 26.95.
Back in 1998, when Jose Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize, there were a number of critics who felt that the wrong Portuguese author was being honored, arguing that Antonio Lobo Antunes was the best contemporary writer [...]
The Easy Chain by Evan Dara
ShareThe Easy Chain, Evan Dara. Aurora. 502pp, $16.95
Evan Dara’s sophomore novel, The Easy Chain, published thirteen years after his outstanding The Lost Scrapbook, is likely among the most bizarre novels published in 2008; however, it also must be among the most compulsively readable (and re-readable) of them. The novel centers around the rarely-seen Lincoln Selwyn, [...]
Berlin: City of Smoke by Jason Lutes
ShareBerlin: City of Smoke, Jason Lutes. Drawn and Quarterly. 200 pp. $19.95.
With the release of Berlin: City of Smoke, the second volume of a projected trilogy, Jason Lutes’ painstakingly chronicled historical fiction in graphic form gathers momentum. Tracing the long, slow arc of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Berlin packs the power of a [...]
Fuzz & Pluck: Splitsville by Ted Stearn
ShareFuzz & Pluck: Splitsville, Ted Stearn. Fantagraphics Books. 280pp, $24.99.
In a roundup of new graphic novels published last year, critic Elif Batuman offered an interesting insight about an eminent round-headed kid and his dog:
[T]he hero-in-two-persons arrangement is vestigially present in many cyclically narrated comics. Probably the best-loved example is the duality of Snoopy and [...]
The Assignment by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
ShareThe Assignment, or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (trans. Joel Agee). University of Chicago Press. 129pp, 15.00.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s short novel The Assignment, originally published in German in 1986, is written in twenty-four long sentences (Dürrenmatt’s model for the novel’s structure was said to be the twenty-four sections of Bach’s [...]
Invite by Glen Pourciau
ShareInvite, Glen Pourciau. University of Iowa Press. 120pp, 16.00.
“You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for artists.”—Anton Chekhov 1
Anton Chekhov thought the writer should articulate the human predicament, not judge or diffuse it with proposed solutions. Despair and disappointment are rich and [...]
Happy Families by Carlos Fuentes
ShareHappy Families, Carlos Fuentes (trans. Edith Grossman). Random House. 352pp, 26.00.
Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families begins with a mystery: A wink. It is the wink of Pastor Pagan. He is the patriarch of “A Family Like Any Other,” a title that the reader soon discovers is Fuentes’ pointer to Tolstoy’s famous statement that “happy families are [...]
Woods and Chalices by Tomaz Salamun
ShareWoods and Chalices, Tomaz Salamun. Harcourt. 96pp, $22.00.
Some poetry is meant to be read on the page—to take only the most prominent current example, Elizabeth Alexander’s presidential inaugural poem “Praise Song,” the merits of which are far more evident in print than they were at the podium. Other poetry is written to be read aloud, [...]
The Journal of Jules Renard
ShareThe Journal of Jules Renard. Tin House Books. 264pp, 16.95.
The Journal of Jules Renard is a bound collection of the insights and observations of the titular French playwright and novelist. Renard kept his journal from 1887, when he was twenty-three years old, to just a month before his death in 1910, and in the journal [...]
Five Spice Street by Can Xue
ShareFive Spice Street, Can Xue (trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping). Yale Press. 352pp, $25.00.
No one and nothing may be trusted in Five Spice Street, the first of Can Xue’s full-length novels to be translated into English. In the neighborhood where the story is set—a three-mile-long street actually—nothing is certain. There is no one truth. [...]
John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987
ShareAshbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987, John Ashbery. The Library of America. 1042pp, $40.00.Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, John Ashbery. Ecco. 364pp, $16.95.
The period following WWII was a turbulent time politically, culturally, poetically. Brave people hid in shadow from the new-found threats to civilization as they knew it—the bomb, the pill, the Red scare—and [...]
my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
Sharemy vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, Jack Spicer (Peter Gizzi and Kevin Kellian eds.). Wesleyan University Press. 510pp, $35.00.
(continued from page 1)
Now, let’s move to the West Coast and what’s been happening.
Who knows what Jack Spicer would have been capable of had he lived as long as Ashbery. Unfortunately, [...]
You Must Be This Happy to Enter by Elizabeth Crane
ShareYou Must Be This Happy To Enter, Elizabeth Crane. Punk Planet/Akashic Books. 250pp, 14.95.
Elizabeth Crane’s newest story collection, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, is a disarming artifact, so much so that it’s difficult to review. The book is so much fun to read that you set down your evaluative filter and forget to [...]
Issue 14 Winter 2009
Features
CONTEST: Win Bolaño’s English-Language Oeuvre and More
The Quarterly Conversation’s winter contest! First prize is every single one of Roberto Bolaño’s works available in English. Details here.
From the Editors: On Writing and Work
“There are four ways to survive as a writer in the US in 2006: the university; journalism; odd jobs; and independent wealth,” argues Keith Gessen in n + 1. We disagree.
Soulbroken
“It was a sunny day, hot and not real breezy, when I brought Oblivion with me to my bench. I felt almost cheeky, book in hand, making my way to the pond, like I knew something everyone else at the office didn’t know. It was easy to find the part of the story I loved so much because I had marked it off and marked it up . . . “
William Gaddis, the Last Protestant
William Gaddis’s career could have started with the question, “Work?” John Lingan argues that no single word better encapsulates the concerns and organizing metaphor for Gaddis’s artistic project.
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
Legends abound regarding Bukowski the drinker, Bukowski the womanizer, Bukowski the belligerent, Bukowski the unexpectedly tender-hearted. But among the many titles bestowed upon Bukowski, that of “working stiff” is rarely invoked. Nicole Gluckstern explores Bukowski the worker.
The Great Work Goes On: Carter Scholz’s Radiance
Crossing the concerns and techniques of Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, and Richard Powers, Carter Scholz has been writing some of our most interesting fiction about science, commerce, and America. Sacha Arnold digs into Radiance, his novel of nuclear weapons research scientists.
My Life in Alumni Profiles
What happens when work-based writing starts to dominate creative writing? Barrett Hathcock reveals his struggles with alumni profiles.
Reviews
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Share2666, Roberto Bolaño (trans. Natasha Wimmer). Farrar Straus Giroux. 912pp, $30.00
There is a void at the center of all of Roberto Bolaño’s work. This is not simply a void in the sense of a blackness, a blankness, an emptiness, or a space from which nothing can emerge—although, at times, it is all of these things—Bolaño’s [...]
The Pages by Murray Bail
ShareThe Pages, Murray Bail. Vintage. 224pp.
Australian novelist Murray Bail made a note in the early 1970s in which he instructed himself to “Invent (for depth of individuality); less ‘reportage.’” He seems to have followed it quite faithfully. From the outset, Bail’s fiction has been driven by this commitment to imagination and a concomitant disregard, verging [...]
Souls of the Labadie Tract by Susan Howe
ShareSouls of the Labadie Tract, Susan Howe. New Directions. 125pp, $16.95.
In 1922, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein stated that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” and since that time, poets have constantly complained about the limitations of language—most without attempting to do anything about it. Two that have tried are [...]
Saga/Circus by Lyn Hejinian
ShareSaga/Circus, Lyn Hejinian. Omnidawn. 146pp, $15.95.
continued from page 1
Saga/Circus consists of two parts in reverse order: the first part, “Circus,” is prose that reads like poetry, and “Saga” is poetry that reads like prose. Hejinian, in her Poetic Statement found in American Women Poets in the 21st Century, acknowledges that she is a difficult writer: [...]
Tranquility by Attila Bartis
ShareTranquility, Attila Bartis (Imre Goldstein trans.). Archipelago Press. 325pp, $15.00.
After mud and pouring rain have been the constant companions of the sad characters in Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s hopelessly miserable (but astonishing) film Damnation, agony finally ends with the camera ceasing its nonstop movements and staring at a giant clump of muddy filth. It’s a [...]
boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague
Shareboring boring boring boring boring boring boring, Zach Plague. Featherproof Books. 288pp, $14.95.
For good reason, Featherproof Books’ description of its latest release, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague, emphasizes how the book’s design is meant to contribute to a reader’s appreciation of the story: the book is beautiful. The promotional letter [...]
If I Could Write This in Fire by Michelle Cliff
ShareIf I Could Write This in Fire, Michelle Cliff. University of Minnesota Press. 104pp, $21.95.
Michelle Cliff is an author about whom it is far easier to find academic criticism than criticism of the popular variety. A Jamaican-American, her short novels abound with the nuggets of colonialism and postmodern identity for which academics fervently prospect. For [...]
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi
ShareThe Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wang Anyi (Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan, trans.). Columbia University Press. 440pp, $29.95.
The translation into English of Wang Anyi’s 1996 novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, marks an important development in the way most literary Westerners, particularly Americans, view China. For many years now, translation of modern Chinese literature [...]
From A to X by John Berger
ShareFrom A to X, John Berger. Verso. 224pp, $22.95.
What is the use of hope in a hopeless situation? This is the question John Berger seems to answer with his tenth novel, From A to X. The titular letters stand for the main characters, A’ida and Xavier. He is in prison, and she devotedly writes to [...]
The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño
ShareThe Romantic Dogs, Roberto Bolaño (trans. Laura Healy). New Directions. 128pp, $14.95
English-language readers have experienced Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s career sort of upside down and backwards. None of his work was translated into English until after his death in 2003, and it wasn’t until the publication of Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives in [...]
Erotomania: A Romance by Francis Levy
ShareErotomania: A Romance, Francis Levy. Two Dollar Radio. 160pp, $14.00.
Erotomania: A Romance is not a book you can give as a gift. It just isn’t. For starters there’s the title, which is no red herring. And then there’s the cover, with its picture of two chimps copulating in the missionary position. Both of these, however, [...]
Death with Interruptions by José Saramago
ShareDeath with Interruptions, José Saramago (trans. Margaret Jull Costa). Harcourt. 256pp, $24.00.
Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and death are just stories, and this is another one.
—José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
José Saramago prefaces his newly translated novella, Death with Interruptions, with two epigraphs: a prediction and a supposition. “We will [...]
Issue 13 Fall 2008
Features
Latin America’s Kafka: What a Sly Argentine Has in Common with a Tubercular Czech
Some of the 20th century’s most innovative fiction came out of Prague and Buenos Aires. Scott Esposito argues that there’s a potent link between the plots being written in each.
Reading Claude Cahun
French gender-bending artist Claude Cahun is generally known as a photographer. She also left behind an impressive body of literature. Lauren Elkin argues should it be read, especially by adherents of challenging Surrealist works.
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: Hard Situations and Easy Morals in Tobias Wolff’s Short Fiction
John Lingan considers Tobias Wolff’s new, career-spanning collection of short fiction. He finds a writer in great debt to Hemingway and unable to embrace the grotesque.
Reviews
All One Horse by Breyten Breytenbach
ShareAll One Horse, Breyten Breytenbach. Archipelago Press. 170pp, $20.00.
I.
In the preface to All One Horse, Breyten Breytenbach, playfully writing under the moniker “A. Uthor,” explains the artistic impulse behind this book of 27 “minor pieces of writing” and their accompanying 27 watercolor paintings with the following bit of Eastern philosophy:
The title is culled from a [...]
Boxwood by Camilo José Cela
ShareBoxwood, Camilo José Cela (Patricia Haugaard tranns.). New Directions. 224pp, $14.95.
A poet I used to know once asked me how novelists knew when to stop writing. When I pressed him for more specifics about what he meant, he explained that he didn’t understand how anyone could tell when to stop expanding a description, a stretch [...]
Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart
ShareWatching the Spring Festival, Frank Bidart. Farrar Straus Giroux. 72pp, $25.00.
In her introduction to Best American Poetry 1990, Jorie Graham describes a fiction and poetry reading she attended. First, a fiction writer spoke and her story flowed, sentence to sentence, idea to idea, engaging the crowd completely with funny, plotty narratives. Next, a poet stood [...]
The Implacable Order of Things by José Luis Peixoto
ShareThe Implacable Order of Things, José Luis Peixoto (Richard Zenith trans.). Nan A. Talese. 224pp, $22.95
I.
Reading José Luis Peixoto’s first novel, The Implacable Order of Things, we are presented with a world not likely to last long, absent a messiah, populated by orphans—a biblical myth that doesn’t imbue tragedy with meaning. The book narrates the [...]
Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
ShareSenselessness, Horacio Castellanos Moya (Katherine Silver, trans.) New Directions. 160pp, $15.95.
Senselessness is the first novel by Honduras-born Horacio Castellanos Moya to be translated into English, and though it’s quite slim, it’s a stunner. Hired by the Catholic church to copyedit an 1,100-page report which details (with gruesome exactitude) military massacres against the indigenous peoples of [...]
Winners Have Yet to Be Announced by Ed Pavlic
ShareWinners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway, Ed Pavlic. University of Georgia Press. 200pp, $19.95.
Film critic Michael Atkinson once described his own suicidal impulses, eventually overcome, as feeling like “a nagging last item on a lifelong agenda”—not something the sufferer wants to do, but something he feels he inevitably must do. [...]
Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek
ShareTomato Girl, Jayne Pupek. Algonquin Books. 298pp, $23.95.
From the beginning of Jayne Pupek’s Tomato Girl, we are plunged into a dark world. In the first few pages of the novel, 11-year-old narrator Ellie Sanders reveals that she is living in the aftermath of abandonment. Her father has been gone for some time, leaving her with [...]
Basrayatha by Muhammad Khudayyir
ShareBasrayatha: Portrait of a City, Mohammed Khudayyir (William M. Hutchins trans.). Verso. 176pp, 15.95.
I.
“It is useless to seek Basra on a map,” writes Iraqi author Najem Wali in “Basra Stories,” “for Basra belongs to those cities which are built by their cursed and fleeing sons in the . . . lands of memory.”
Muhammad Khudayyir’s Basrayatha [...]
Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low
ShareThing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, Jackson Mac Low. University of California Press. 507pp, $34.95.
Besides being released the same year by the same press, Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low and Leslie Scalapino’s It’s go in horizontal share a number of other commonalities. The primary is that they were written as a response [...]
It’s go in horizontal by Leslie Scalapino
ShareIt’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006, Leslie Scalapino. University of California Press. 257pp, $16.95.
(continued from page 1)
Let us turn now to Leslie Scalapino, whose anthology, It’s go in horizontal, is equally worth owning. Whereas Mac Low, although from New York, was an iconoclast who never really fit into any particular school, Scalapino is considered [...]
The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
ShareThe Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig (Joel Rotenberg trans.). NYRB Classics. 224pp, $14.00
Reading The Post-Office Girl is like trying to hit a slow-breaking curveball. You know the break is coming—you can intuit that the seemingly conventional story is going to drop on you in some way—but it hangs high for so long that by the time [...]
The Horacio Castellanos Moya Interview
ShareIn Notes about the Political in the Latin American Novel, Horacio Castellanos Moya wrote:
[I]f someone tells me that I write “political novels,” I immediately get on guard. My reaction is primal, but it has an explanation. First, I don’t like to attach labels to the fiction I write; to me they are novels or stories, [...]
Fourteen Questions for Jean-Philippe Toussaint
ShareThere are three disclaimers to be made. First, I work for a literary publishing house (Dalkey Archive) that is currently publishing this man, Jean-Philippe Toussaint. We keep reprinting his old books, signing on new ones—we cannot get enough of him. Second, he is also one of my own favorite writers, although as I write this [...]
Issue 12 Summer 2008
Features
Macedonio Fernández: The Man Who Invented Borges
All writers are influenced by someone, but Borges is often seen as wholly self-made. Marcelo Ballvé investigates an overlooked influence who himself is worth reading.
Becoming Simone de Beauvoir
The second volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s journals has just been published in France. Lauren Elkin explains what they show about the 20th-century’s most famous feminist before she met Sarte and as she was developing her ideas on love and gender.
Anne Waldman, Anselm Hollo, and the Authentic Avant-Garde
Wondering what comes after postmodern writing? Ravi Shankar has found it in a couple of revolutionary poets.
The Book Art of Robert The, Cara Barer, and Jacqueline Rush Lee
Elizabeth Wadell talks to three artists about how they make art from objects already overloaded with significance, objects that can be extremely difficult to bake, cut, and paste.
Why I Joined the POD People
Print-on-demand publishing may not be right for all authors, but it is for Richard Grayson. He explains why he stopped publishing his work the usual way and just started doing it himself.
Living Beyond the End: On Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
Matthew Cheney finds in Paolo Bacigalupi’s ecology-based, apocalyptic science fiction some of the best sci-fi stories of the last decade.
Disassembling Donald Barthelme: Flying to America’s Unfortunate Disorganization
Donald Barthelme’s short stories are currently available to readers in three large volumes. Dan Green argues we could read Barthelme better if they were still available as they were originally published.
Reviews
Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe
ShareGirl Factory, Jim Krusoe. Tin House Books. $14.95. 208 pp.
I.
A faithful rendering of events can tell us no more about existence than a preserved body in Pompeii’s wreckage: we observe the corpse but we understand nothing of the life it once contained. The imagination, with all its distortions, is always far more revealing, whether on [...]
Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
ShareIn her short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” Lorrie Moore has a bit where she describes Midwestern college students: “They were armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but they were extremely good-natured about it.”
Such is many people’s understanding of World War II: it’s [...]
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
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Assuming the format of an Everyman’s dictionary of writers, Robert Bolaño’s novel Nazi Literature in the Americas, consists of a series of short profiles, 30 brief fictitious lives of pan-American fascist novelists and poets, depicted with such straightforward urbanity and good humor that one almost misses the sick joke behind the pretense. I’m reminded of [...]
Mortarville by Grant Bailie
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John Smith, hero of Mortarville, is a unique kind of orphan, grown in a tank of orange goo by his scientist fathers and made a ward of the state after their deaths and his birth (in that order). Unique to us, anywayhe’s a familiar enough specimen to the authorities in the book’s shambles of a [...]
Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
Share• Armageddon in Retrospect, Kurt Vonnegut. Berkley Trade. $15.00. 240 pp.
Kurt Vonnegut’s estate has released the author’s first posthumous collection of essays and short stories, Armageddon in Retrospect, with an introduction by Vonnegut’s son, Mark. Because this is the only book currently planned to punctuate the important writer’s career, one might have expected to find [...]
Kissed By by Alexandra Chasin
ShareThe opening sentence of Alexandra Chasin’s Kissed By reads like a line from the first chapter of an odd sort of origin text: “I began as we all do, by wanting something, but I hardly knew what.” And indeed it is a fitting point of origin, because it establishes the creative impulse behind the rest [...]
Knowledge of Hell by Antonio Lobo Antunes
ShareAmericans like our Romance-language novelists to be whimsical and playful, so it makes sense that Antonio Lobo Antunes has nowhere near the following in this country as, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Italo Calvino. Knowledge of Hell, written in 1980 but only now translated to English, has moments of hallucinatory fantasy but nothing close to [...]
The Christophe Claro Interview
ShareFor a long time, many major American books were either not translated into French or poorly executed when done at all, due to the difficulty of the task. Since the early 1990s, things are changing thanks to a number of translators, among whom Christophe Claro stands out. A writer who became a translator by chance, [...]
Issue 11 Spring 2008
Features
Over and Under
Our opinionated contributors pick 10 overrated books and 10 underrated books.
Where the Readers Are
Stephen King may be the loudest, but he isn’t the only one to proclaim the short story dead. Sam J. Miller argues people are just reading it in new ways.
France’s Foremost Absurdist
How do you turn the death of the last orangutan into fiction? François Monti investigates Eric Chevillard and argues that his untranslated Destroying Nisard sheds light on America’s book review crisis.
Sound of Myself
The Internet makes you feel more ignorant, argues Barrett Hathcock. It might actually make you more ignorant too.
Denis Johnson’s Varieties of Religious Experience
John Lingan examines how William James’s view of “religious genius” unlocks the novels of Tree of Smoke–author Denis Johnson.
Reviews
The Power of Flies by Lydie Salvayre
Share The Power of Flies, Lydie Salvayre (trans. Jane Kuntz). Dalkey Archive Press. 175pp, $12.95.
Blaise Pascal—the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher centrifugal to Lydie Salvayre’s The Power of Flies—underwent, in the latter half of his life, some kind of personal metamorphosis: he morphed, quite publicly, from a man of scientific methodology and knowledge to a deeply [...]
It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature by Diane Williams
ShareIt Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, Diane Williams. FC2. 104pp, $17.95.
I.
For Diane Williams, the bloom and buzz of perceptual experience are formal inspirations as well as thematic ones. Her fiction relentlessly foregrounds the less noble aspects of our cognitive life—obsession, distraction, forgetfulness—by making them into the forces that sculpt her prose. [...]
Guatanamo by Dorothea Dieckmann
ShareTo start with the obvious: Guatanamo is a political novel. I don’t mean this only in terms of its topical subject matter, although that’s true as well.1
But Guatanamo is also a political novel in the Brechtian sense: it concerns itself primarily with a situation—a set of institutional conditions—and places a character into this situation to [...]
Dirt for Art’s Sake by Elisabeth Ladenson
ShareThese days, American readers may legally partake in an unprecedented array of pornographic materials. Works of literature whose racy content made them banned as late as the 1960s—that were in fact thought unpublishable as late as the ’50s—can be purchased, often as proud members of the canon. When filthy literature is excluded from bookstores, it [...]
Riding Toward Everywhere by William T. Vollmann
ShareRiding Toward Everywhere, William T. Vollmann. Harper Perennial. 288pp, $14.99.
Riding Toward Everywhere, this year’s new book from the prolific William T. Vollmann, is a nonfiction account of his adventures hopping freight trains and trying out the hobo lifestyle as a person lurking “literally and figuratively in the shadows.” His traveling companion is a late middle-aged [...]
Best American Magazine Writing 2007
ShareA book of magazine articles implies certain contradictions. Magazines are read and then, a few weeks or months later, recycled or passed on, while books linger, asserting their worthiness to be reread. The anthology Best American Magazine Writing 2007, consisting of winners and finalists from the American Society of Magazine Editors’ annual awards and published [...]
Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef al-Mohaimeed
ShareWolves of the Crescent Moon, Yousef al-Mohaimeed. Penguin. 192pp, $14.00.
Compared to the well-trod literary provinces of Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, and even parts of Asia and Africa, the Middle East’s literature is one that few English-language readers know much about. Perhaps to help fill this gap, Penguin has published Saudi writer Yousef [...]
Matrimony by Joshua Henkin
ShareGraymont College’s Prof. Stephen Chesterfield, the less-is-more creative writing teacher who appears early on in Joshua Henkin’s second novel Matrimony, hates sound effects in stories (“kerplunk,” “kaboom”), the phrase “show, don’t tell” in workshop criticism, and “pass-the-salt dialogue”: “If your characters need salt, just give it to them. Don’t make them have a discussion about [...]
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
ShareGiven the exultation and edification of reading Diary of a Bad Year, it would seem that J.M. Coetzee has definitively escaped the post-Nobel jinx. Though nominally in the postmodern camp, the novel notches low on the difficulty scale. To enter this hall of mirrors that is tangentially an account of a highly regarded South African [...]
Issue 10 Winter 2008
Features
The Fruits of Parasitism: Unraveling Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady
Novelist Enrique Vila-Matas might just think literature is a disease and himself a parasite of it. Scott Esposito discusses why this has let him write some of the most innovative fiction published today.
The Literary Alchemy of César Aira
César Aira tosses absurd ideas into his novels by the handful and never bothers to revise or even edit. Marcelo Ballvé argues this method has pushed him to the forefront of the Argentine literary scene.
My Own Private Mexico
It’s a shame Rodrigo Fresán’s Mantra hasn’t been translated into English, argues Javier Moreno. The book has mutated with each of its four translations, and a fifth would add new readings to the preceding four. Not to mention, English readers should know about Fresán’s continuously expanding inventory of all things we thought were Mexican but aren’t and his ethological study of sea monkeys in captivity (their natural habitat).
Story, History, or Historia?
In Mexico, José Emilio Pacheco’s The Battles in the Desert is read by everyone from rock stars to high school students. In it, they find such typically Mexican concerns as memory, history, and national identity in a multicultural society. Elizabeth Wadell discusses how, for American readers, these matters don’t sound very foreign after all.
Bond, In Mexico: An Homage to an Homage
The Mexican Revolution is a solemn touchstone of Mexican letters. Matt Bowman shows why Mexican author Jorge Ibargüengoitia has satirized and subverted it, and why he wishes more authors would follow in his steps.
Life is Freedom: The Art of Vasily Grossman
ShareThe continued obscurity of the Soviet author Vasily Grossman is not easy to understand after one has spent any time with his writing, but a few conjectures come to mind. His masterpiece, Life and Fate, was published in the United States in 1985, and in 1985, the year that Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of [...]
Reviews
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute by Julio Cortazar
ShareA consummate innovator, Julio Cortazar was—in my opinion—one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Seriously, anyone who hasn’t read Hopscotch should run immediately to the nearest bookstore, library, or friend’s shelf, and get a copy. This is a perfect example of the old cliché about how lucky someone is to have not read [...]
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
ShareThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz. Riverhead. 352pp, $24.95.
I.
At one point in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrator recounts the death of Dominican political crook Joaquín Balaguer. A direct descendant of the Trujillo regime—the genocidal dictatorship that held the country in a stranglehold until the United States [...]
Vibrator by Mari Akasaka
ShareAlcoholism, Bulimia, Consumerism, Depression: Mari Akasaka’s short novel Vibrator reads like a virtual primer of 21st-century decadence and malaise. An immediate hit when it was published in Japan in 2000, it touches all the bases (women’s magazines, consumer culture, high school prostitution, gangs, and drugs are all analyzed), yet it is definitely more than just [...]
The Maias by Jose Maria Eça de Queirós
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The Maias is regarded as the most important work of the late 19th-century Portuguese writer Jose Maria Eça de Queirós. For the most part, the book follows the life of Carlos de Maia and his grandfather, Afonso de Maia, the last remaining male survivors of an extremely wealthy Lisbon family.
Young Carlos is raised by his [...]
God Is Dead by Ron Currie, Jr.
ShareBefore we get to God Is Dead, Ron Currie, Jr.’s first book, I’d like to mention a few authors and their work for some historical context. Think of the following: Dostoevsky and his character Ivan Karamazov, who might or might not have suggested that God’s disappearance would create a moral universe that permitted anything; Nietzsche [...]
The Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom
ShareLate in Selah Saterstrom’s second novel, The Meat and Spirit Plan, the unnamed narrator describes a movie she would like to make. She’s rebuffed: “That is a terrible idea for a movie. . . . It isn’t entertaining.” This follows:
Why does it have to be entertaining? I ask. You can’t expect people to pay 10 [...]
Partial List of People to Bleach by Gary Lutz
ShareReading Gary Lutz can be an exhausting experience: his carefully rendered, off-centered constructions are so minutely prepared that they retain their architecture from word to sentence to paragraph to section to story. Lutz’s previous efforts—Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive—are conventional-length collections, but even though his new work, Partial List of People [...]
Sons and Other Flammable Objects by Porochista Khakpour
ShareDarius Adam, his wife Lala, and their son Xerxes live in Los Angeles after fleeing Iran during the Iranian Revolution. Darius pines for Iran, Lala hopes to lose herself in the ways of the Western world by “getting a life,” and Xerxes hopes to shed his Iranian identity to distance himself from his father. A [...]
How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland
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Despite the popular tolling of the novel’s death knell, former Booker prize chair John Sutherland has decided to put together a populist user’s guide to reading a novel in the 21st century. What he has created in How to Read a Novel is a clever book, assuredly for someone who is interested in literature, but [...]
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee
ShareIn the 1930s, the surgeon Wilder Penfield pioneered a remarkable technique that is still in use today for some types of brain surgery. While the patient remains conscious, the surgeon cuts a large hole in the top of her head, removes a portion of the skull, and peels back several layers of tissue in order [...]
Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger
ShareI have a love/hate relationship with my digital camera. On the one hand, I love how easy it is to snap a shot, see it, and take another if I’m not satisfied. On the other hand, once I’ve taken the pictures there’s the daunting task of uploading them to the computer and searching through them [...]
The Charles D’Ambrosio Interview
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The following interview with Charles D’Ambrosio took place on October 2, 2007, in Birmingham, AL.
D’Ambrosio is the author of two books of short stories—The Dead Fish Museum and The Point—as well as Orphans, a collection of essays. The Point was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of [...]
The Pascale Ferran Interview
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Pascale Ferran is the director of the film Lady Chatterley. The film has won 11 awards, among them 5 Césars (including ones for Best Film and Best Writing-Adaptation) and Lumieres for Best Director and Best Actress. Lady Chatterley was released nationally in the United States in June 2007, after premiering at The Tribeca Film Festival [...]
Issue 9 Fall 2007
Features
The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care)
Garth Risk Hallberg sorts out literary feuds, dissects James Wood’s essay against Don DeLillo’s 832-page opus Underworld, and argues that this book actually evolves the novel forward.
Cogito, Ergo Doom: Exit Ghost and the Rest of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Books
Barrett Hathcock reviews the new, final Zuckerman novel and considers Philip Roth from the standpoint of all nine.
What are Prisons For?
Convicts write, and often very well. Scott Esposito discusses the state of America’s prisons and two new memoirs from Arizona’s prison writing program.
A Pocket Full of Change: Trannies, Transformation, and the Gender Gap
Are two genders enough? Brien Michael wonders what two new books about men turning to women and women turning to men tell us about gender today.
Reviews
Throw Like a Girl by Jean Thompson
ShareJean Thompson has written two novels and a previous short story collection; she has won prestigious fellowships and awards; she has been a nominee for the National Book Award (for her first collection, Who Do You Love, in 1999). Her stories are widely anthologized, and she is admired by some gifted and established writers—Richard Russo, [...]
Vain Art of the Fugue by Dumitru Tsepeneag
ShareReading Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Vain Art of the Fugue is like having a dream, and then remembering it in that diaphanous, vague, next-morning way a dream is recollected. This is a good thing.
Maybe if this strange novel means to say anything, it’s comparing the experience of music to the experience of dreams. As the [...]
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
ShareThe narrator of Tom McCarthy’s brilliant and unusual novel, Remainder, is recovering from a horrible accident. “It involved something falling from the sky,” he tells us. “Technology. Parts, bits. That’s all I can divulge.” He can’t tell us more for two reasons. One, he’s not permitted to, because [...]
new poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz
ShareIn 1944, 23-year-old Tadeusz Rozewicz’s older brother was murdered by the Gestapo. It was one body among many that the Polish resistance fighter saw carted through the streets; nearly sixty years later, the aging poet faces his own coming death, but he is not taking it any more quietly than while fighting the Nazis. In [...]
Goldberg: Variations by Gabriel Josipovici
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Goldberg: Variations. Immediately the reader thinks of Bach, whose Goldberg Variations were, as legend has it, composed to help cure the insomnia of a rich patron named Goldberg. Bach’s piece had thirty variations, and there are thirty parts to this book. In the first we find Goldberg, a poet and a Jew, hired to read [...]
Right Livelihoods by Rick Moody
ShareEach of the three novellas in Rick Moody’s Right Livelihoods ends with a breath of mid-air. In “The Omega Force” (the first) and “The Albertine Notes” (the third), the ending is a winding down, an exhaustion, an impressive feat of rhythms coming to an end and characters giving up on reiteration, though they don’t know [...]
So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor
ShareOnly fourteen words into Jon McGregor’s second novel, So Many Ways to Begin, we’re off to the races with an armload of questions in desperate need of answers: “Eleanor was in the kitchen when he got back from her mother’s funeral, baking.”
He returned from her mother’s funeral? One might even wonder if this is a [...]
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
ShareKokoro opens in an unassuming manner. The nameless narrator, pen in hand, recollects the first moment he met Sensei on a summer holiday in Kamakura, a popular getaway. His traveling companion, a fellow student, had returned home to attend to a sick mother, and after a swim on the beach the narrator notices a Westerner [...]
Before I Wake by Robert Wiersema
ShareFor his debut novel, Robert Wiersema has set himself up against multiple challenges. First, how to tackle subject matter that is generally the domain of manipulative tearjerkers? Then there’s the more-than-subtle hint of the supernatural, which if not handled with subtlety ends up striking a sequence of increasingly false notes. The miracle (to use a [...]
Issue 8 Summer 2007
Features
How to Feed the Monster
Two years ago, Brad Vice’s debut short story collection was pulled after plagarism charges. Now the collection has been published. Barrett Hathcock wants to know if the charges were legit, if the book is worth reading, and what it all means.
Roberto Bolaño: A naïve introduction to the geometry of his fictions
In Bolaño’s novels, themes, ideas, events, and even characters constantly recur. Javier Moreno has figured out how to fit all the books together. Turns out to be a triangle.
Educating Bolaño’s Orphans
Four years ago, Bolaño’s first English-language translation was published. Now, four books later and with Bolaño a legitimate phenomenon, Scott Esposito reassesses Bolaño’s first book and wonders why Bolaño has become so popular so fast.
Reviews
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
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In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon doesn’t waste time getting into the plot. The first paragraph reads
Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was [...]
At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman
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I.
In his 1955 piece, “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay,” Clifton Fadiman pronounced the genre dead, done in by a “digressive and noncommitting” method nearly impossible to practice in “an age of anxiety.” More than half a century later, in her charmed and charming collection, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, Anne Fadiman [...]
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
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“There’s a laser scope . . . that can measure the vibrations in the glass of a window across the street, and then translate them into sounds. From there it’s one stop to hearing the conversation going on in that room,” says a character in Michael Ondaatje’s new novel Divisadero. Decades earlier, a different character [...]
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
ShareFalling Man, Don DeLillo. Scribner. 272pp, $14.95.
In his famous (some might say infamous) appendix to his influential study, The Postmodern Condition, cultural theorist Jean-François Lyotard contends that the postmodern work struggles continuously, if paradoxically, to find a way to present the unpresentable. Its goal, whether in the form of one of Ad Reinhardt’s all-black canvases, [...]
Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón
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It’s perhaps fitting that Daniel Alarcón’s new novel Lost City Radio features a blurb from Colm Tóibín comparing the novel to George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s works. Although Tóibín is almost assuredly comparing the imaginative scope of the novel to Orwell and Huxley, he has perhaps unwittingly also made a fitting comparison to Orwell’s and [...]
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Share3:31 pm Sit down on my brown couch that looks out over the Hollywood sign and begin to read Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, After Dark, which clocks in at a slim 208 pages.
3:32 Drink water.
3:34 Realize the book is told in the present tense in a single night, with each chapter bearing a clock showing [...]
The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani
ShareChris Abani’s third novel, The Virgin of Flames, is set in the crumbling, beautiful parts of East L.A. where Hispanic and African Americans live. The City of Angels, “iridescent in its concrete sleeve,” has become a receptacle of wind and ash as brush fires sweep through the state. The atmosphere of dread and suspense in [...]
The Assistant by Robert Walser
Share“I contemplated pride and love. All this contemplativeness. When will I be free of it?”
—Robert Walser, 1926
Robert Walser is admired today mostly for his short prose pieces, which originally appeared as entertaining feuilleton in Swiss and German newspapers in the early decades of the 20th century. It is said that Kafka would search the paper [...]
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
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Literature is a sustained coincidence between imagination and reality mediated by language. Imagination and reality in indo-anglian fiction, brewed from history, ideology, and myth, are poured into those epic tuns that sell so well in our literary bazaars. Buttressing them is the belief of critic and novelist Amit Chaudhuri that “since India is a baggy [...]
The Last Novel by David Markson
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I cannot come to this review unbiased. Few new novels would excite me as much as one from David Markson, as he has been writing unusual and brilliant novels for decades at a slow and steady pace. Starting with 1996’s Reader’s Block, he has written three books that form a sort of trilogy (the other [...]
Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich
ShareI vividly remember being at a slumber party in middle school and dancing with my friends to our favorite music. Together we moved, feeling the beat and vigor of the music. I didn’t feel tired, but instead kept feeling increasingly swept up by the collective energy. I remember losing all sense of time, thoroughly engaged [...]
The Chris Andrews Interview
ShareAs the translator of the first four books by Roberto Bolaño to appear in English, Australian Chris Andrews has played a key role in bringing one of the Spanish language’s major 20th-century voices to American readers. A member of the language department of the University of Melbourne, Andrews’s translation of Bolaño’s Distant Star won the [...]
The Natasha Wimmer Interview
ShareIn addition to translating The Savage Detectives, Natasha Wimmer has translated numerous books by Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as books by Laura Restrepo and Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Her work has also appeared in The Believer, where she discussed translating Don Quixote, and, most recently, The Savage Detectives. Currently Wimmer is at work on translating [...]
The C.M. Mayo Interview
ShareC.M. Mayo is an award-winning writer, translator, and editor who focuses on bringing Mexican literature to English-speaking audiences. As an American living in Mexico, she saw how little of the literature was available in English (and vice versa) and founded the nonprofit Tameme, Inc. to promote translations of writing from the United States, Canada, [...]
Issue 7 Spring 2007
Features
No Funny Business: How Orhan Pamuk’s Postmodern Fictions Fall Short
All successful postmodern literature contains a comic element, argues Dan Green. Orhan Pamuk just isn’t funny.
Thrice Told Tales: How Stories Become Reality in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow
Oral storytelling is an essential part of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s beliefs about art and politics. Scott Esposito explains how storytelling works on three levels in Thiong’o’s newest novel, Wizard of the Crow.
Déjà Vu: On Rereading Catch-22
The language, logic, and structure of Catch-22 are like a Mobius strip, argues Elizabeth Wadell. So is rereading.
Excerpt: Cautionary Tales
New work from Edie Meidav and Ken Stout, from their forthcoming book, Cautionary Tales.
Reviews
Amulet by Roberto Bolaño
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Roberto Bolaño was the type of writer most writers want to be or think they already are: stylistically bold, thematically engaging, readable and re-readable; in other words, undeniably exceptional. Bolaño, who died in 2003, was a writer whose style is deceptively simple yet whose books and characters take hold of one’s brain–all or most or [...]
The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
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E.M. Forster devotes a chapter of Aspects of the Novel to the quality of prophecy, telling us that very few authors write with it. The realm of prophecy, he writes “is not a veil, it is not an allegory. It is the ordinary world of fiction, but it reaches back.” We are, Forster continues, “not [...]
The Shape of Things to Come by Greil Marcus
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For the sake of convenience, let’s divide world of criticism into three levels. The first level is the most base, the easiest, and perhaps the most valuable—the thumb. A thumbs up or thumbs down? This is the criticism of a friendly recommendation; this is the criticism of year-end lists, whether they’re constructed by some blog [...]
Poor People by William T. Vollmann
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In the U.S., the “poverty line” for 2006 was set at $9,800 per year of income for a single person, or $20,000 for a family of four. But it is misleading to judge poverty in this way: surely some people can live comfortably below those income levels, and some—those with significant medical problems, for example—couldn’t [...]
The Mystery of the Sardine by Stefan Themerson
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If there is a detective setting out to solve the mystery of the sardine, s/he sits in a chair (perhaps an armchair) reading Stefan Themerson’s novel The Mystery of the Sardine. The detection is in the reading, and the mystery is in the text, in the asking: What is this book about? How are all [...]
Of Song and Water by Joseph Coulson
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Joseph Coulson’s second novel, Of Song and Water, concerns a jazz musician coming to endings: a career on the skids because of hands that can no longer make the chords he needs; a boat, falling apart and weighted with memories of his father, and of his father’s father before him (both men casting long shadows); [...]
Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose
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Francine Prose confesses—and professes—a fundamental truth of writing on page two of her recent book on writing, Reading Like A Writer: “Like most, maybe all, writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from books.” True and simple enough. But when MFA programs are legion and pedagogical anxieties run high, the teaching of [...]
Golden Country by Jennifer Gilmore
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Jennifer Gilmore’s debut novel, Golden Country, is a richly woven tapestry of immigrant life in the first half of the 20th century. Its disappointments and rewards lie in the breadth of its goal: to entwine the stories of three different immigrant families over the course of fifty years, and then to untangle the conventions and [...]
All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones
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Nostalgia in literature often seems to be left to the usual suspects–the white males. Readers grasp at the prosperity of Fitzgerald’s New York, the stiff-upper-lippedness of Wodehouse’s England, the superhero ’60s/’70s of Lethem and Chabon. Possibly, someone is even yearning for Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. It’s of interest then, when a black novelist takes on a [...]
The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Stephen Levy
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As I entered the grocery store checkout line, I immediately let out a sigh. Not only were there several packed carts in front of me, but the checker was involved with an unhappy customer—an apparent dispute over the charges on her receipt. I felt my impatience rising, certain of the long wait ahead of me. [...]
Issue 6 Winter 2007
Features
Basking in Hell: Returning to William H. Gass’s The Tunnel
William H. Gass’s 650-page novel The Tunnel is one of the most complex, challenging books published in English in the 1990s. Stephen Schenkenberg investigates two valuable offerings from the Dalkey Archive Press helping us understand this disagreeable and stunning novel.
New Cliches: How Mulligan Stew Uses Old Lines to Slam Pretentious Authors
Mulligan Stew, considered by many to be Sorrentino’s greatest novel, is also probably the one in which his anger most powerfully dictates content. Yet, argues Scott Esposito, it’s not a rant, or a mere satire, but a literary masterpiece.
World Cinema: The Independent Spirit of the Toronto International Film Festival
If the space for innovative cinema has shrunk over the course of two decades, unconquered territories still remain, perhaps even thrive, in the early 21st century. M.S. Smith discovers some of them at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Value of Religious Diversity
Is it correct to accept religion and science as squaring off across a red-blue scrimmage line? J.C. Hallman argues for a more inclusive view of each.
Howdy Neighbor
John Updike is my neighbor. I have not talked to John Updike. He seems rather vaguely pissed off at me.
What is Appropriate: Teaching Invitation to a Beheading, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Others to High Schoolers
Is it right to teach 12th-graders a book that involves blow jobs? Where should the line be drawn, and who should draw it? Teachers? Administrators? Matthew Cheney delves into his time as a teacher to find an answer as to what is appropriate.
Reviews
Whose Freedom? by George Lakoff
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When I agreed to review George Lakoff’s new book Whose Freedom?, there were
many things I didn’t know. I didn’t know that Steven Pinker would review it
in The New Republic. I didn’t know that Lakoff would write an angry rebuttal
to the review, or that a nasty
exchange laced with ad hominem attacks
would ensue. I didn’t know that [...]
Remember Me by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
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As a brand new mother, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen confesses she was an unlikely candidate to initiate a detached investigation of America’s changing funerary rites and practices. She also admits that she wasn’t the only one strolling the aisles of the undertaker’s convention with a baby in tow. Funeral homes are, after all, a family affair. [...]
Red the Fiend by Gilbert Sorrentino
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I didn’t recognize Gilbert Sorrentino the one time I was lucky enough to meet him and hear him read. Next to William Gaddis’s, his writing is the funniest in American literature, yet this humor is incongruent with dustjacket photographs that made him look alternately like some Mafia don silently ordering whackings, and the greaser with [...]
Triangle by Katharine Weber
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Before September 11, 2001, the deadliest workplace disaster on U.S. soil was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took place on March 25, 1911 and killed 146 workers. Katharine Weber’s excellent new novel, Triangle, is about both disasters, as well as (among other things) genetics, classical music, family, and history. What unites these threads is [...]
Suspension by Robert Westfield
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The Brooklyn Bridge spans the Hudson River, connecting the New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. When it was completed in 1883 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—longer than the previous record-holder by fifty percent—and was for many years after that also the world’s tallest structure. The literary symbolism of its neo-Gothic [...]
Issue 5 Fall 2006
Features
Haruki Murakami’s Meaningful Metaphors
Haruki Murakami’s plots feel like modern-day fairy tales. Scott Esposito considers how Murakami’s plots come to resemble and evoke the inner minds of his characters.
Haruki Murakami’s Supernatural War
Ever since World War II ended, American novelists have used China, Italy, the Philippines, Dunkirk, Dresden, and many other battlegrounds to represent everything from the effect of racism on American society to the strength of the American family. Katie Wadell argues that Haruki Murakami introduces us to an altogether different warfront in novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase.
A Short Guide to Murakami’s Short Fiction
One of our time’s most fecund writers, Murakami has composed a dizzying array of short fiction. Here, Matthew Tiffany runs down some of the best, making an excellent starting point for those looking for an entry into Murakami’s short works.
How Can We Read in an Age of Images?
How to reconcile the Internet’s love of the image with literature’s blocks and blocks of words? Finn Harvor has a few answers.
Reviews
A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman
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When the German army sped across the Soviet border in June 1941 in a double-cross that left the more-than-adequately forewarned Stalin shocked and a few of his most prominent generals conveniently scapegoated and summarily shot, Vasily Grossman, too, was caught unawares. The Ukrainian novelist was fat, brainy, and Jewish, credentials that were more counter than [...]
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
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In the introduction to the English edition of his new short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami writes: “I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.” Yet if the individual stories are [...]
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
ShareThe challenge in reviewing a new book by Haruki Murakami is that one has a sense of writing for a group of people who already know about his work—Murakami-fanatics, if you will—and they have preconceived notions. They’re reading the review for tidbits, excerpts, news. Like writing a review of a new Star Trek movie, you’re [...]
The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
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Clare Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a novel that obstinately defies easy classification. It is, at various times, and often at once, a contemporary comedy of manners, a postmodern fairy tale, a murder mystery sans a body, and an apocalyptic canto.
The novel begins with a tony dinner party in Sydney in March 2001, where Danielle [...]
The Obstacles by Eloy Urroz
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The Obstacles is the first novel translated into English by Mexican writer Eloy Urroz, who is one of five Mexican writers who took part in writing the Crack Manifesto—a manifesto which declares its signatories against the Latin American literary tradition of Magical Realism. The Obstacles is the story of two writers, Elias and Ricardo, who [...]
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
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Though I don’t know much about Australia, its origin seems an irresistible tale, one that begs novelistic retelling, either as a vast metaphor or as a historical panorama. In her new book The Secret River, Kate Grenville chooses the latter approach. The story deals with the colony of New South Wales, newly home to British [...]
Visigoth by Gary Amdahl
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“The imagination will not down,” William Carlos Williams writes in The Great American Novel. “If it is not dance, a song, it becomes an outcry, a protest. If it is not flamboyance it becomes deformity. If it is not art, it becomes crime. Men and women cannot be content, any more than children, with the [...]
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner
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Peter Orner’s The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is a collection of vignettes loosely strung together like macaroni on yarn. It takes place in a boys’ primary school in Goas, a tiny outpost in Namibia’s desert, yet the childish setting belies the narrative’s nuanced artistry; each short chapter is titled by a character, a time [...]
Tomorrow They Will Kiss by Eduardo Santiago
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In Tomorrow They Will Kiss, Eduardo Santiago explores the inter-woven lives of six Cuban-American women by examining their relationships and their past in Cuba. Told from the perspectives of three of the six women, the narrative goes back and forth between different characters, blending the events of the past into present-day drama.
Caridad, Imperio, and Graciela [...]
Issue 4 Summer 2006
Features
Some of the Best Books Since 1990
Reviews
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
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If superheroes dominate the “mainstream” of comics, then autobiographical comics are the dominant genre of the “independents.” From R. Crumb’s trailblazing confessionals to James Kolchalka’s daily diary strip, making comics about oneself seems irresistible to independent artists. Successful autobiographical comics succeed by finding something insightful in everyday life (John Porcellino) or by virtue of transforming [...]
Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo
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About halfway through Total Chaos, author Jean-Claude Izzo references director Marcel Pagnol’s immortal Fanny trilogy. Those three movies are about an epic love affair—love found, then lost, then resoundingly reclaimed—and in them the breezy, feisty port city of Marseilles is as much of a character as any human. The cast of this 1950s triptych is [...]
Hungry Planet by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio
ShareI’m the kind of person who loves maps. The last time my mother visited, she and I stayed up until 2 am examining a National Geographic map of Europe, saying things like, “So that’s where Kiev is!” Something about them just draws me in, makes me lose track of time in the minutia of mountains, [...]
The Din in the Head by Cynthia Ozick
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Cynthia Ozick’s latest book of essays, The Din in the Head, contains a surprising splinter of biography. In “James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel,” Ozick reveals that she once taught freshman composition to engineering students.
The mind reels—not just from the essay, which is one of the collection’s best (a direct response to “The Lesson of [...]
In Night’s City by Dorothy Nelson
ShareIrish writer Dorothy Nelson’s short novel In Night’s City is the story of a family in which love and abuse can never be uncoiled. First published in Ireland in 1982, the book is now being released in the United States as part of the Dalkey Archive Press’s Irish Literature Series (which also includes Nelson’s second [...]
Music from Big Pink by John Niven
ShareIt started with Big Pink the house. Then came the LP, The Band’s classic 1968 debut record that lodged itself so thoroughly in our cultural subconscious we’ll forever be humming its lines, “Pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ ’bout half past dead . . .” Now comes Music from Big Pink, a novella by John Niven, [...]
The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis
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One of my favorite episodes from Thucydides is when the Athenians decide to whether to invade Syracuse. With Athens already stretched by the demands of the war with Sparta, their leader Pericles reminds them how difficult a task such an expedition will be—the cost, the number of ships, the number of men. It would require [...]
Realm of the Dead by Uchida Hyakken
ShareFor some time now, the dearth of an audience in this country for translated works has provided the online literature community with fodder for discussion. While newspapers use space to argue against the influence of blogs on sales of fiction—and, by extension, assert their own (fading) importance—blogs turn their attention to Reading the World, calling [...]
Issue 3 Spring 2006
Features
Breaking the Code: Against Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate
Steven Pinker implies that art that isn’t rooted in evolution is perforce bad and irresponsible art. Dan Green has other ideas.
Reconsidering Thomas Bernhard’s Correction
Bernhard’s predominant concern is the subordination of reality to language. David Sepanik discusses how in Correction the process of language overwhelms lived existence.
Reviews
The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery
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What does it take to convince a skeptical public of a scientific fact? If nearly 150 years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, school boards and courtrooms are still arguing over whether to teach the theory of evolution in schools, how long will it be before people accept theories that have just recently [...]
Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert
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Many authors leave behind unfinished works when they die. Far fewer leave behind unfinished works that can be considered masterpieces. Gustave Flaubert’s last unfinished novel Bouvard and Pecuchet is without question his masterpiece, even in its unfinished state, towering above the more famous, but less enjoyable, Madame Bovary.
Bouvard and Pecuchet are two middle-aged copy clerks [...]
Time Was Soft There by Jeremy Mercer
ShareAfter fleeing Canada for Paris in 1999, crime reporter Jeremy Mercer has no clear idea of where to go with his life. A casual stop at the legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore proves to be the beginning of a life-changing experience, which Mercer documents in Time Was Soft There.
Modeled after Sylvia Beach’s original bookstore [...]
Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap
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“The earth is a tightrope; our train speeds across the flat thin wire. They say that a century from now this will all be gone, that the oceans will rise above this threadbare patch of earth. . . . I can’t quite believe this because I never believe anything I won’t be around to see.” [...]
A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman
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When the German army sped across the Soviet border in June 1941 in a double-cross that left the more-than-adequately forewarned Stalin shocked and a few of his most prominent generals conveniently scapegoated and summarily shot, Vasily Grossman, too, was caught unawares. The Ukrainian novelist was fat, brainy, and Jewish, credentials that were more counter than [...]
Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin
ShareThough the market for fiction that makes political commentary has seen better days, the nonfiction best-seller lists are packed with passionate missives from liberals and conservatives alike. Even though the latter generally preaches to the choir and fiction may do better at breaching the ideological divide, people seem to want their politics and their fiction [...]
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders
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“It’s safe to say no novels have yet engaged with the post-Sept. 11 era in any meaningful way,” opined Rachel Donadio in an early August issue of the New York Times Book Review. Though the veracity of her sentence lies on that marshy word “meaningful,” I’d argue that she’s incorrect. In the past year or [...]
Issue 2 Winter 2006
Features
Creative Oppositions: The Poetry of Frank Bidart
Hate and love, the horrifying recognition that opposites contain each other, these are the things Bidart illuminates in flaming letters. Elizabeth Wadell considers Bidart’s Star Dust, delving into this feverish and impassioned collection.
Reading Alberto Moravia’s Boredom
Scott Esposito investigates Moravia’s 1960 masterpiece, Boredom. The protagonist, Dino, can only know the outside world by owning it, yet everything Dino tries to possess slips from his grip.
Reviews
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
ShareAttempting to combine historical science with a hefty dose of troubled marriage, Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart struggles mightily to convince readers of its credentials in both realms while managing to engage us in neither.
Millet liberally drops in anecdotes that may or may not be fictional with the intent of turning the [...]
Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds
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Contrary to the impression one might get from the increasingly prominent coverage of the “graphic novel” in the mainstream press, words and pictures have a long history of coexistence. Sometimes the words overtake the pictures (illustrated novel), sometimes the pictures overtake the words (many children’s books), and often there is integration (comic strips, comic books). [...]
Big Lonesome: Stories by Jim Ruland
ShareJim Ruland’s Big Lonesome isn’t merely a collection of clever, funny stories. More than just a clever author, Ruland is adept at creating precise, bizarre yet completely honest studies of the human condition while surprising us at every turn.
In “Night Soil Man,” the employees of an Irish zoo (owned by the Belfast Corporation) must [...]
Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi
ShareZainab Salbi’s life is difficult to pin down in a sentence. Is she “a member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle who defected to the United States”? Or is she the “founder of the charity organization for war victims ‘Women for Women International’”? Until her book, Between Two Worlds, was published this year, she kept those [...]
Issue 1 Fall 2005
Features
The Art Behind Putting Together an Issue of a Literary Journal
Dan Wickett talks to the editors of two literary journals to find out just how they do it.
Reviews
Devil Talk by Daniel Olivas
ShareDevil Talk is a rich mix of contemporary short stories and folk tales of individuals dealing with evil in various forms: confronted by it, instigating it, dancing with it, and victimized by it. Fantastical events mingle with daily life in these stories that are immersed in Chicano and Mexicano culture, and often occur against the [...]
The Breaking Point by Stephen Koch
ShareRussian spies, Spanish fascists, and Hemingway sipping mojitos in Madrid. Somewhere between the genres of biography and historical fiction lies Stephen Koch’s new book, The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, literary and political intrigues surround the lives of two famous authors [...]
Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto
ShareBanana Yoshimoto’s Hardboiled & Hard Luck, available in an English translation by Michael Emmerich, consists of two long stories. Although unrelated, the stories are joined by the shared yearning of the female narrators and the fact that both take place after a major tragedy has occurred. “Hardboiled” has the more complex plot, following the narrator [...]
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
ShareI would call A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit’s new book, atypical, except that I’m not quite sure what constitutes “normal” for this writer. Solnit is the author of eight previous books, and they are quite a mixed bunch. Two of them, Wanderlust and River of Shadows, could be considered histories, of walking [...]
The Constant Conversation
The latest posts at the blog of The Quarterly Conversation
A Taste of Cherry in a Heat Wave
I’ve been thinking a lot about heat waves. The thick summer weather has felt like a wall of fire that must be bravely pushed through to order to exit from an air conditioned office building and make my way to the corner to board a bus crowded with sweaty citizens. So perhaps it’s no surprise that [...]
The Ballad of David Markson
"What’s not so up for dispute is that Markson accomplished what, by all rights, should be a literary impossibility." (Colin Marshall for The Millions)
Gass-X
"Ich liebe dich. No sentence pronounced by a judge could be more threatening. It means that you are about to receive a gift you may not want." Via Dylan Suher, Greg Gerke's sort-of review of William H. Gass's Reading Rilke in BIG OTHER.
“Sands immense / Impart the oceanic sense,” Or, Daring to embark on Clarel
A fan of Herman Melville must have patience. He must appreciate digression and the dissolution of pattern or plan. He must enjoy the sheer rush of words, a proper Biblical torrent of them. And he must be able to find pleasure in philosophical dialogue as much as in wild anecdote. But must he read Clarel? Can [...]
Amazon’s Inability to Grasp Irony
This is just one small example.
Complete Thomas Bernhard in English: A Checklist with Pictures
Thomas Bernhard is certainly one of the major, titanic writers of any era, any country. Enormously influential, unremittingly bleak and pessimistic but never without a sense of humor, his style evolved into single-paragraphed philosophical rants extending hundreds of pages, the best of which are Woodcutters, ‘Walking’ (from Three Novellas), and Gathering Evidence. I have finally [...]
On Penguin 75
Ever since Penguin's 75th Anniversary roadtrip I have intended to address the somewhat simultaneous release of Penguin 75, a sort of vanity book of Penguin covers. This book is delightful, but flawed. Delightful, but misleading.
Let not the poets be your guide.
In The Unicorn Hunt (1993), the fifth book of Dorothy Dunnett’s cycle of historical novels of early Renaissance Europe, the House of Niccolo, Dunnett tells of the deficiencies of wealthy merchant Anselm Adorne’s relations with women thus: His wife Margriet could have warned him. He was familiar with motherly wives and the skittish ways of other [...]
Conversation with Ahsahta Press
Janet Holmes, director of Ahsahta Press, based at Boise State University in Idaho, took the time this week to share her thoughts on poetry publishing as part of my ongoing series of publisher profiles. Ahsahta publishes seven full-length collections of poetry a year, including recent works by Kate Greenstreet, Lisa Fishman, Rusty Morrison, and Julie Carr. Like some other small presses, Ahsahta offers a yearly subscription option, which is one of my favorite ways to buy poetry and encounter the work of many poets who are new to me, as well as poets whose newest books I always look forward to reading. Janet says more about this and what it's like to craft a press's identity and consistent aesthetic.
Not a spine-tingler, in the least
An unfortunate side effect to the lengthy transition of print to digital is our long suffering endurance of stale articles in mainstream media rehashing the same points as every other article in mainstream media.
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Bonus Articles
The latest articles published in between issues
In Homer’s Head: Ransom by David Malouf
In Ransom, Malouf satisfyingly gives us a meeting between Priam and Achilles that builds from the interiority of Priam. The novel seems to want to teach the importance of doing something human to those who might never get around to picking up Homer or who, if they do, might wish they could get into the character's heads.
How Jeanette Winterson Makes Fiction
Winterson has always told and retold the same fictions: of parents and children; of origins, and adoptions; of differences, of margins; of love; of passion; she has always manipulated rhythm and language as an excavation of sources. Much of her fiction mirrors what we know of Winterson's own story, but she agitates against the idea that her work has to be considered as fiction or autobiography, laying claim to both. In Art Objects she writes: "The question put to the writer 'How much of this is based on your own experience?' is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing"; a "separate reality." At every turn she eludes the critic, the interviewer, the reader; she offers truth, but not the truth. "I'm telling you stories. Trust me."
Inveterate and Unrepentant Book Collecting: A Guide to My Favorite Contact Sport
It's difficult to pin down exactly why books as objects mean so much to me. I wasn't alive when William Goyen's excellent Come, The Restorer was published, but owning an original printing with the dust jacket—as it would have been purchased at the time of its release—makes the book more special to me than some beat-up paperback reissue. If it's signed, even more so. I'm only really interested in modern first editions (say, post-1950 or so)—before that books get quite expensive, but also I don't think they look as nice, since many were issued without dust jackets, and at that time the dust jacket wasn't considered a permanent part of the book, so they're often missing. So why the obsession and collecting, and why is it so important?
The Master of the Not Quite: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood
Wood can be harsh, yes, but he is seldom unfair. Wyatt Mason was wrong to accuse him of having suggested, by dint of a string of negative reviews, that no good contemporary literature exists. (He has written favorably of McEwan, Bolaño, Robinson, Ozick, Kirsch, Sebald, Roth, Saramago, Swift, Carey.) He never simply dismisses a writer (in the manor of, say, Dale Peck); on the contrary, his criticism, even at its most polemical and uncompromising, is inexplicably bound to larger concerns about the direction of contemporary fiction. Two major concerns have dominated James Wood's writing: realism and religion. In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, his first collection, newly available in paperback from Picador, these two concerns are beautifully imbricated, resulting in what is surely among the finest achievements in recent literary journalism.
A Warehouse with an Epic Scope: Entrepôt by Mark McMorris
To say that Mark McMorris's Entrepôt is about writing poetry is to do a huge disservice to this beautiful and penetrating book, whose ostensible subject of contemplation is how to live, love, and make do in a time of war, if not cultural crisis. On the other hand, the book's greatest service, at least to my eye, is in its exploration of just what it means to be a poet—I should be more specific and say a lyric poet—amid our contemporary terrors.
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