Country friends have flocked to London for a little shopping, and you’d like to offer them luncheon. Or perhaps your cook’s mother has developed one of those sudden and disastrous illnesses endemic among cooks’ mothers during the holidays. Or maybe you’d like to prepare “a restrained and anglicized Bouillabaisse” for guests who refrain from meat. What do you do?
If the Book is doomed, it could have no better funeral director than Austin-based artist Lance Letscher. He may be inclined to dismember the deceased, but he’ll leave behind a beautiful corpse. The raw materials for his intricate and startlingly colorful collages are mined, by and large, from his favorite Dumpster out back of a local used-book and -record store, where he collects discarded volumes—he’s especially fond of shiny-covered college tomes and beat-up high school books—for his studio-cum–chop shop. The resulting mosaiclike collages call to mind the work of Martín Ramírez and Adolf Wölfli in their near-vibratory geometry and imagistic
Tennis may be a joy to play and a pleasure to watch, but it’s not a sport that lends itself easily to literary endeavor. The average tennis match has a few hundred largely indistinguishable points, and the scoring system reads like something out of a high school calculus book. An entire library devoted to the sport might be reduced a handful of volumes and one classic work of nonfiction, John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, published forty years ago.
The Bun Field begins with a typical comic-strip scenario: An adolescent girl lies in bed, dreaming of talking ducks and dinosaurs. This Slumberland scene displays little Winsor McCay–like polish, though; the Disneyesque ducks are rendered with childlike simplicity, and the dinosaur is as crudely penciled as a drawing taped to a kindergarten wall. The child smiles and winces in her sleep and then, at the sound of nuts being cracked, awakens to a daylight world scarcely less surreal than the one she just left behind. In her debut graphic novella, Finnish cartoonist Amanda Vähämäki proves to be a master at
As a retrospective of the work of Wassily Kandinsky makes its way from Munich to Paris to New York over the course of this year—roughly tracing the artist’s own westward path during his lifetime—fortunate viewers will experience one of the greatest concentrations of his art. Much as previous shows have presented piecemeal considerations of his body of work, so have publications tended toward examinations limited to certain media or particular periods. But to see the evolution of his painting is to witness the birth of a modernist master: early figurative canvases mixing French Impressionism and Fauvism with Russian folktales; the
What secret was trying to pierce through this hallucinatory and hermetic language?” asks poet Ghérasim Luca in his long-lost classic The Passive Vampire. The book, first published in French in 1945 by Les Éditions de l’Oubli in Bucharest, is chimerical and delirious yet remarkably concrete in its lewdness. Blending personal confession, prose poetry, meditation, verbal games, catalogues, and hymns to desire, this hybrid book is a Surrealist carnival that taps satanic and psychic rituals. Bawdy and bizarre, it also evokes the era’s dark history, including anti-Semitic pogroms. Writing of the earthquake that devastated Bucharest on November 10, 1940, Luca internalizes
“O LORD, WHAT A VARIETY OF THINGS YOU HAVE MADE! In wisdom you have made them all.” We know He made the lamb and the tiger, but what about the yeti, the kraken, and the manticore? Not to mention the Invunche, a “twisted, deformed, pathetic creature” that started out as “an innocent Chilean boy who is sold to a warlock.” Then there’s the flesh-eating Burmese Khimakha, an ogre so hideous that he’s ugly “even by ogre standards.” Oh, and Mothman: It looks like a human, except that it has “massive wings, no head, and a set of large, reflective eyes
Early in his new book of essays and reviews, George Scialabba declares himself a “utopian” and a “radical democrat,” though he concedes, parenthetically, that he owns up to this identification “on fewer days of the week than formerly.” It is the most succinct statement Scialabba provides of the sensibility governing What Are Intellectuals Good For?, which collects the work of more than two decades spent addressing the broadest philosophical and historical issues in five thousand words or fewer in the back pages of newspapers and magazines.
My sister is in our parents’ bedroom, at Mother’s vanity dresser. She tries on earrings and necklaces; she hazards a provocative smile; she puts her right elbow on the glass-covered dresser top and places her chin on her hand. (Her ballet-class hand, soft but alert and slightly rounded.) Before dinner, she will ask: “Who do I look more like, Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge?”
Some of the big questions about US fiction since World War II are obvious. Why did the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge become the highest credential for male writers (Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, Wallace)—and why have its authors been mostly elite and white? Did fiction truly split up after the ’60s on lines of identity, as many think, so that female authors had to decide whether they were creating “women’s writing,” and the minimalists of the ’80s (Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips) became representatives of marginalized whiteness?
On one level, Wounded Cities reads as a personal lament for a world supposedly at peace before September 11. On another, it is a personal inquiry into the consciousness of increased terrorism across the globe since that day. Retrospection and apprehension share an uncomfortable space in this beautiful book. Its author, Leo Rubinfien, is a middle-class New Yorker now in his mid-fifties. His family moved into an apartment only a few blocks from the World Trade Center shortly before it was attacked. At his window, he witnessed the crime while his wife was on her brief walk to her job.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will seem curiously lonely when it arrives in theaters this July. For the first time since the film series premiered in 2001 with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, no one is anticipating a new Potter novel by J. K. Rowling, the books having run their course two years ago. The films still have a ways to go; after Half-Blood Prince, Warner Bros. plans to split the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two films and release them in 2010 and 2011. The stated reason is that the company wants to
Aleksandar Hemon does not write for, in his words, “therapeutic reasons.” But as the virtuosic author told me over a southern-fried lunch in Chicago one cold, damp March afternoon, writing has unexpectedly helped him fuse his two lives: At twenty-eight, in the spring of 1992, he became stranded in Chicago during a month-long journalism program, when his home, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, fell under siege and was ravaged by civil war. In just a few years, Hemon was publishing stories written in English, which he perfected by reading Nabokov and canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace. Hemon, a MacArthur “genius,” has since
Once upon a time, in a land I’d like to visit for dessert—before Skinny Cow and Tasti D-Lite and before America came along and voted plain old vanilla its favorite flavor year after year after year—ice cream was serious stuff. It was so serious, in fact, that people believed it could be deadly. Though sharbat, a fruity drink served over snow or ice, existed in the Middle East in medieval times, the Western world was slow to catch on. Hundreds of years later, Europe was still in thrall to the lingering Hippocratic idea that “suddenly throwing the body into a
When Samuel Huntington died late last year, obituary notices and memorial appreciations noted that the former Harvard political scientist was among the most influential thinkers of the late twentieth century. Huntington served as a mentor to a generation of scholars—but unlike them, he also served as an adviser to Washington policymakers. And his most enduring legacy will be the argument known informally as the Huntington thesis: the idea that global conflict stems from the competing cultural identities of seven or eight “civilizations.” This idea gained cachet after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which
What was so great about I. F. Stone? For many journalists—most but not all of them on the left—“Izzy” remains the ultimate scribbler of truth to power. Like-minded bloggers claim him as a patron saint; last year, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard began awarding an annual I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. D. D. Guttenplan concludes his new biography, American Radical, “I. F. Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his ‘brand’), but to change the world.”
Unbalanced tokens, check your syntax. Non-closure is at the end of this excerpt: ment as the reason behind Prokofiev’s stubborn insistence on returning to Petersburg121.9091
Books claiming to decipher evangelical Christianity for the secular reader are nothing new, but the Bush years ushered in the genre’s golden age. Following the 2000 election, scores of pundits sought to explain the rise of the Christian right, and some of their efforts were worthwhile. For The Great Derangement, Matt Taibbi went undercover at a fundamentalist retreat that culminated with a mass exorcism where he was encouraged to vomit up demons, and he walked away understanding how easy it could be to “bury your ‘sinful’ self far under the skin of your outer Christian.” D. Michael Lindsay conducted interviews
When one dreams of an island paradise, Diego Garcia probably isn’t in the picture. Unless, of course, you’re from Diego Garcia, and your family members were among the nearly two thousand people forced off that and neighboring islands a thousand miles south of India between 1968 and 1973 so Americans could pave it and put up a military base. For the Chagossians, as they are called, Diego Garcia was paradise then, replete with azure waters, white sand beaches, swaying coconut trees, and hurricane-free tropical weather, not to mention decent homes and plentiful food. And then the inhabitants were gone. The
Quick: When you think of inner-city poverty, urban blight, gang violence, and steep high school dropout rates among chronically unemployed minorities, what American cities come to mind? Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Chicago, maybe Saint Louis? Yet recent studies show that smaller cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are plagued by the same problems—indeed, to a worse degree. Small-to-midsize older industrial cities didn’t experience the “comeback” secured via globalization and high-tech development that helped lift bigger metropolises out of the doldrums over the past two decades. Instead, these “forgotten cities” slid further into postindustrial malaise, with a massive influx
