| ( ! ) Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$media in /var/www/bookforum.com/prod/src/BookforumFrontendBundle/Controller/BlogController.php on line 161 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Call Stack | ||||
| # | Time | Memory | Function | Location |
| 1 | 0.0000 | 363800 | {main}( ) | .../app.php:0 |
| 2 | 0.0035 | 491208 | AppKernel->handle( ) | .../app.php:49 |
| 3 | 0.0080 | 1038216 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handle( ) | .../Kernel.php:201 |
| 4 | 0.0080 | 1038632 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handleRaw( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:80 |
| 5 | 0.0230 | 2320752 | Bookforum\FrontendBundle\Controller\BlogController->listAction( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:158 |
Early in her writing life, Francine Prose developed an unmistakable voice: sharp, ironic, intelligent, uncompromising. Using this voice the way a miner uses a headlamp, she has crawled her way into the darkest corners of American life — suburbia, academia, post-Columbine public schools, society and culture post-9/11.
Max Weber in America? The idea seems almost preposterous. We often think of Weber as the quintessential European thinker: abstract, worldly, brooding, and difficult. The America of his period of greatest productivity, the first two decades of the twentieth century, comes down to us as isolationist, anti-intellectual, bombastic, and about to embark on flapperdom. How could one have any influence on the other?
The ability to comprehend unspeakable violence is based largely on scale. Today it's frighteningly easy to imagine a situation where you might be killed by someone. But for most of human history, it was more difficult to conjure the deaths of thousands of people. Technology makes it possible to the point that we can watch, into perpetuity, as portions of humanity are wiped away by natural disasters or by terrorists in hijacked airplanes. Why do we bother to watch at all? Is it a skewed attempt at empathy?
Suicide by Edouard Levé tells two intertwined stories. In one, a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man’s life. In the other, a young author has killed himself, but not before writing a novel in which a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man’s life. Part of what makes the experience of reading Suicide so singular is that the young author in question is Edouard Levé himself: Ten days after handing in his manuscript, Levé hanged himself, at age forty-two. It is all but impossible when reading, then, not to be constantly aware that Levé
Near the beginning of The Long Goodbye, her bracing and beautiful memoir of grief, Meghan O’Rourke offers the reader a simple disclaimer: She is one of the lucky ones. She had a good relationship with her mother, who died at the age of 55, of metastatic colorectal cancer. She had time to prepare for the inevitable—to acquaint herself with the billowing depression and “profound ennui” that consumes every survivor. She said her goodbyes, and said them again. She and her mother eventually discovered a “new intimacy”—a fresh “openness”—borne of their shared sense “that time was passing.” Her mother
Janet Malcolm is to malice what Wordsworth was to daffodils. In nine previous books, she’s so thoroughly, so indelibly investigated a certain breed of malice—the kind that festers in the writer-subject relationship—that it ought to bear her name. Malice is journalism’s “animating impulse,” she writes as she turns reportage inside out to show us its seams (and seaminess) with trenchant ceremony. Biography and journalism are rotten with exploitation, venom, voyeurism; we’ve just averted our eyes. Like the child who cries that the emperor has no clothes, she announces truths hidden in plain sight.
“I have never been much interested in what other people have had to say about her,” writes Sigrid Nunez of Susan Sontag, with whom she lived briefly in the mid-1970s, when she was dating Sontag’s son, David Rieff, who hadn’t yet moved out of Mom’s house. In her 140-page reminiscence of her experiences in the Sontag household, Nunez takes a big risk: After all the corpse-picking volumes and essays that have appeared since Sontag’s death in 2004, is there anything left to say?
Yes. Nunez, a novelist best known for 2006’s The Last of Her Kind, tempers intimate observations with critical distance,
The great are a pretty mixed lot, especially in politics. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were among the great, each in his own monstrous way. Churchill was, too, for both good and evil, and Roosevelt as well, though mainly he was lucky. De Gaulle may or may not deserve to be included in such company, but he certainly behaved as if he was sure he did.
When Ishmael Reed gets celebrated these days, now that he’s well past age seventy, it’s usually for the work he did decades ago. The novels that enjoy broadest critical approval are Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and Mumbo Jumbo (1972), two comic and surreal historical revisions. Reed was hailed as the great African-American among our homegrown postmoderns (Thomas Pynchon gave him a tip of the cap in Gravity’s Rainbow), if not our foremost black novelist. Esteem like that no longer flutters around his name, but the author himself was the first to shoo it away. He derided such praise as
In the past decade, a handful of writers have added compelling twists to the classic immigration novel, adding new and unexpected layers to tales of newcomers in new lands. Jeffrey Eugenides, for example, wrote about a hermaphrodite immigrant in Middlesex; in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the protagonist had a fantastic imagination and used an unexpected language infused with Spanish and video game slang. Now comes David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, an immigration novel in which the characters don’t actually immigrate.
Instead, the book, set in the 1970s, focuses on the
"The train climbed the steel trestle high over the forest of red and brown buildings that tumbled across the landscape," wrote Harrison Salisbury in his 1958 account of life among Brooklyn's fighting teen gangs, The Shook-Up Generation. "From the platform . . . I looked down in the tenement back yards, the rubbish piles and bright paper tatters brightened by wash lines of blue and pink, purple and yellow. Here and there I saw the scraggly green of Brooklyn back-yard trees dwarfed by soot and sickened by cinders."
This grim landscape, once an ill-defined slum housing Italian dockworkers, is
"Since obviously under any analysis I have to do either O or O´ (since O´ is not-O), that is, since �–�(O v O´) . . . " Got it? A posthumous book by David Foster Wallace grapples with questions about fatalism and free will.