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Sarah Bernhardt was the first modern celebrity, skilled at P.R., engaged with her own mythologizing and with a howling emptiness at her core. Her first publicity stunt was to shout, "You miserable bitch" at a grande dame and slap her in the face...
Auster's latest novel isn't another self-referential puzzle: its power derives from how intensely its characters look into themselves and their pasts—worriedly, regretfully—in a manner that evokes the heartfelt, introspective tone of his memoirs.
Though these stories begin with a Kasbah gossip, sharp of eye and tongue, and end with the towering rages of an Arab patriarch, The Clash of Images feels remarkably like good news. The first American publication of Abdelfattah Kilito’s fiction presents a Muslim world in the process of transformation, in a North African seaport still under French rule; it reveals how that culture out of the North, embodied in everything from French schooling to Tintin comics, swept away habits of thought that had sustained the Arab Old City for centuries. Yet the mood would never be termed angry, but rather
The idea that elegy is the essence of poetry is an old one, and has always seemed to me worth resisting. This protest is probably the privilege of youth—and, if I'm honest, probably the privilege of privilege—but I prefer to think of it as an insistence that art can be larger than life, and life larger than loss.
I can't say that Geoffrey O'Brien's Early Autumn quite changed my mind on the question, but this book of elegant, often moving poems certainly forced reconsideration.O'Brien is the editor-in-chief of the Library of America and an accomplished cultural historian who's lent his brisk,
"There should be no shame ever surrounding the love of or identification with a place, a way of life, a band, or a pair of glasses."
—Maria Bustillos, from The Awl's "Being a Hipster Is An Excellent and Wonderful Thing!"
It's difficult to get a grasp on What Was The Hipster? This is due in part to the very structure of the book: Divided into three sections, it includes a transcript of an April 2009 panel on the death of the hipster, five responses to the panel (two published at other media outlets, three elicited by n +1), and a final section of four essays loosely taking up the volume's
They called her the Queen of Kings. She built a kingdom into a mighty empire that stretched down the shimmering eastern coastline of the Mediterranean. She married—and murdered—her two younger brothers. She bankrolled Cesar and Antony and bore them both sons. She was worshipped as a goddess in her lifetime. She was lithe and darkhaired. She was not beautiful.
The scribes of her time were awestruck by her wit and money, never by her face—she was no Olympias, no Arsinoe II. The coin portraits she issued, our most accurate depictions of her, reveal a beaky little thing with a wide mouth and avid
Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin would readily admit that what, how, and why one reads inevitably change over time. What concerns him is that the act of reading is itself now being changed by the times. The quiet space we require for reading “seems increasingly elusive in our over-networked society,” he writes, “where … it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know.” I have suffered from a form of this allergy to deep engagement and its corollary need for “information”; for the better part of the past decade I mostly
Foreign Bodies, the sixth novel by Cynthia Ozick, is being billed by the publisher as a “photographic negative” of The Ambassadors—“the plot is the same, the meaning is reversed.” Hardy is the soul who scans that description and does not feel a tingling at the base of his spine! For The Ambassadors is not just any Henry James novel, but the work—a towering, virtuosic portrait of turn-of-the-century Europe—that James himself considered his most-accomplished. Is there not something audacious in the suggestion that it could now, even a hundred-plus years later, be re-envisioned? And yet Ozick has
As the theater critic John Lahr once wrote, "Only when [Noel] Coward is frivolous does he become in any sense profound." There's proof of this throughout Barry Day's new book, The Noel Coward Reader, a selection of Coward's plays, lyrics, poetry, short stories, radio broadcasts, and excerpts from his diaries and letters. Here, Coward shifts between his "frivolous" best work, and his more serious (but less successful) attempts to make art that would endure beyond the tastes of the moment. As Day writes, Coward "was a great writer—except when he was trying to be a great writer."
The "Bright
For centuries, writers have sat on benches and made up stories about passersby. Vasily Grossman, Andrei Platonov, and Semyon Lipkin would do this while sitting opposite Platonov’s apartment building in Moscow in the 1930s. Lipkin, the least known of the trio, recounts that the stories Grossman invented were matter-of-fact, journalistic, whereas Platonov’s, rarely grounded in the practical, were more concerned with a character’s interiority, which was “both unusual and simple, like the life of a plant.” This distinction also applies to their prose: Platonov created worlds, and Grossman, the more
Howard Jacobson has just won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question. Today, Bookforum looks back at his 2007 book, Kalooki Nights.
Simon Reynolds’s collection of interviews and essays, Totally Wired, sheds further light on the author’s definitive book on post-punk, 2006’s Rip It Up and Start Again. In its best chapters, Totally Wired is so conversational and discursive that it’s possible to get lost in all the interconnections, gossip, and reminiscences without having read Rip It Up first. The irony here, of course, is that Reynolds—now in Los Angeles after nearly two decades in New York (and, full disclosure, a friend)—has railed at length against rock history’s tendency to “auto-cannibilise its own necrotic myth-flesh.”