February 2012
22 posts
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“Zadie Smith, NW (The Penguin Press. September)
International award-winning and...”
– Penguin Group (USA) press release, February 27, 2012
And we have a U.S. release date for NW, folks!
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A Review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
I am thinking of riddles. When is a fairy tale both fiction and history? How does a fiction become truth? What has the power to alter the past? The answer to all is Red Plenty, a book that spans 32 years of Soviet history, a book that is fairy tale, fiction, and history.
Spufford mingles several fictional narratives—albeit featuring some real, historical figures—with dryer chapters about the...
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“But occasionally a woman is interested in a Houellebecq hero. If he is also...”
– Elaine Blair, “Work, Not Sex, At Last,” on Michel Houellebecq and his latest, The Map and the Territory
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Not on Geoff Dyer Day!
In honor of the U.S. publication of Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, enjoy these Dyer-centric reads:
“Like a tired person trying to get to sleep who is kept awake by sounds from the street that he or she has for years scarcely noticed, I found that the word had become suddenly unignorable.” Dyer on the intrusiveness of the adjective...
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"Extricating Young Gussie"
Because it’s Friday, and you should be laughing.
P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) was a British humorist and prolific writer. He is best remembered for his Bertie Wooster and Jeeves stories, which narrate the escapades of an incompetent young man and his rather brilliant valet. Enjoy this story—the very first—about the pair’s antics.
* * *
She sprang it on me before breakfast....
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A Review: Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman
At first, the storyline of Girlchild may seem a bit worn-out: a young girl, raised by a single mother in a trailer park, suffers from her family’s mistakes and struggles to comprehend them.
But within a few pages, readers will realize how unique Hassman’s novel is. It reaches dizzying heights of devastation, weaves an prodigious collage of stories and voices, and begets Rory Hendrix, one of...
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“‘Look, I’m not saying your plenty is impossible,’ jabbed the...”
– from Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
* * * This book is history, fiction, intertwined narratives, tableaux of 1960s USSR. Spufford’s prose and his ambition should be admired. But, like many an editor, I have a hunch that Red Plenty is “not for me.”
Look for a full...
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Literary Gossip: Shirley Temple was the real...
In 1937 [Graham] Greene was a film reviewer for Night and Day magazine. In a review of the Shirley Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie, he wrote: “Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their...
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A Brief Review: Other People We Married by Emma...
For months before reading this story collection, I thought about its title. I thought about the possibility that all souls were once splintered so that we continually encounter parts of ourselves in others and about anam cara, which is Celtic for “soul friend,” and about Plato’s postulation that every person was once two.
These are things I continued to consider as I read Emma Straub’s stories,...
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Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than... →
A sampling:
On life’s constant little limitations
Calvin: You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.
On expectations
Calvin: Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!
On the evils of mangling words
Calvin: Verbing weird language.
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A Review: Monstress by Lysley Tenorio
In Tenorio’s story “The View from Culion,” a longtime resident of an island leprosarium befriends the newest arrival, an American solider gone AWOL in the Philippines. They have one physical encounter, rare on their ill island:
He fits his fingers in between my own, explores the curve of my wrist, the deep lines of my palm. I press my thumb into his hand, feel his skin move over bone. Then the...
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ONE DAY ALL YOUR TEETH WILL BE MINE by Sasha...
Outside the windows were trees and in front of the windows were plants and on the windows were blinds. The plants were buried in dirt up to their necks. I will bury you up to your neck she said. I said But where. She said The Bathtub. But then I said You’d have to clean the bathtub. Or bathe in the sink. Nothing She said Would make me happier. Except this she said. One day I will possess...
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The New York Times Top 5 Best Sellers in Fiction,... →
In 1962:
Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Little Me, Patrick Dennis
A Prologue to Love, Taylor Caldwell
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