September 2011
18 posts
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A Review: When She Woke by Hillary Jordan
Hillary Jordan’s novel is poised and ready for comparison: with an epigraph from The Scarlet Letter and with dystopian master Margaret Atwood looming, When She Woke could easily have fallen short and remained nothing more than a sketch of inspiration derived from a few great works. But Jordan’s strength as a storyteller rescues her fiction from the horrors of imitation; within a few pages, as...
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“…I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that...”
– —Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
The three books in Pullman’s His Dark Materials series were just a few of the most commonly challenged books in the United States from 2000-2009 (from the ALA’s report), most frequently due to the series’ questioning of organized religion and...
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A Review: Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia by Blake...
One need not read much of Blake Butler’s writing to realize its uniqueness; Butler writes in English but an English so filled with energy and so unlike the language we speak that his writing easily overwhelms, dragging the reader into the confusing and disturbing worlds he creates. In Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, Butler depicts his world—our world—as a mass of tangled wires, things, stuff,...
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Staying awake
I like knowing that a hard-bitten Wyoming cowboy carried a copy of Ivanhoe in his saddlebag for thirty years, and that the mill girls of New England had Browning Societies. There are readers like that still. Our schools are no longer serving them (or anybody else) well, on the whole; yet some kids come out of even the worst schools clutching a book to their heart.
—Ursula K. Le Guin,...
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“In the traditional sex talk, parents don’t say much about pleasure—presumably...”
– Elaine Blair, “Coming Attractions”—a review of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes
Now that’s how you write a book review.
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“Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit;...”
– Dwight Garner, “Dear Important Novelists: Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell”
Many of our greatest contemporary novelists spend 9, 10, 15 years writing one book. Many of their admirable predecessors wrote one a year. Do we have a right to demand more? Should those who suffer...
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A Review: The Art of Fielding
It’s a home run! A grand slam of a novel! A fastball down the middle—and into our hearts. Tip of the baseball cap to Harbach.
Forgive the clichés.
McNally Jackson provided these bits (and more) as Help for Reviewers of The Art of Fielding. They’re funny New York booksellers; their post would not be so funny if the tidbits weren’t all a bit true. Cliché, yes. Reflecting the success and joy and...
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A Review: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner’s debut novel has been cast as a philosophical meditation on art, as seen through his narrator’s, Adam Gordon’s, eyes while on a poetry fellowship in Madrid. Adam moves through the Spanish streets, in Madrid and farther afield, and ends up wandering through museums, dating a gallery owner, visual artist and poet, partaking in a public panel on “Literature Now,” and, albeit...
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“Literature could turn you into an asshole… It could teach you to treat...”
– Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)
The Art of Fielding is “altogether excellent.”
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“Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an...”
– Jonathan Lethem, “The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism”
Doubleday will release Lethem’s book, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc., in November.
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[By any measure]
By any measure, it was endless winter. Emulsions with Then circled the lake like This is it. This April will be Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose early, erased for an hour Silk-brush and ax I’d like to think I’m a different person latent image fading
around the edges and ears Overall a tighter face now. Is it so hard for you to...
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Happy International Literacy Day
At one distant time in my life, I tried to teach English to middle school students in Guinea. Emphasis on tried. Our middle-ground should have been French, and I knew enough to provide crisp explanations of elementary English.
PENCIL. TO WALK. YOU. SISTER. I knew enough French. My students did not.
I began each class by asking a few basic questions: What is the date? What time is it? I chose one...
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“What we have witnessed over the last 50 years is the progressive shittification...”
– Richard Nash in an interview with Matt Runkle, “Revaluing the Book” 