• review • June 28, 2010

    Collected Fictions by Gordon Lish

    Joshua Cohen

    So here I am at midnight, sitting in a Barcalounger, reading the Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish while idly masturbating. Idly, that is, not idol-ly, because Lish is no god of mine so much as he is a lazy indulgence. And if what comes of this is merely tedium with the occasional spasm of delight, then so be it. Nearly all of these one hundred Collected Fictions are written in the first person—no other people exist for Lish—which will explain this guilty pleasure: me speaking as me, but imitating him.

    Perversion, awareness of language, a perverted awareness of language, brevity, comedy, stock

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  • review • June 23, 2010

    The Lovers by Vendela Vida

    Carolyn Kellogg

    The Mediterranean beach setting and amorous title may give the impression that Vendela Vida's new book, The Lovers, is a sexy vacation read. Not quite: There is a bit of romance, but it's just one of several kinds of love that are addressed in this novel, Vida's third.

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  • review • June 21, 2010

    Watching the World Cup

    Sean Callahan

    During the most recent edition of the World Cup in 2006, 16.9 million Americans watched the quadrennial soccer tournament's final game on TV — more than those who tuned in to the NBA playoffs that year. Soccer is growing in the United States, especially because ours is one of only seven national teams to have qualified for all of the last six World Cups. And right now there is little chance of escaping talk about it — even in the United States.

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  • review • June 18, 2010

    Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

    Marisa Meltzer

    Twenty-five years after Bret Easton Ellis left us with “images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards,” in his debut novel, Less than Zero, he’s revisiting Los Angeles with a sequel of sorts in Imperial Bedrooms. Zero’s narrator, Clay, has returned to LA, but this time he has a score to settle: “They had made a movie about us,” he says in the first line, “based on a book written by someone we knew.” Clay, it turns out, wasn’t the narrator of Zero. Instead, an acquaintance turned Clay’s first trip home from college in New England

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  • review • June 16, 2010

    The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

    Edmund White

    The Pregnant Widow begins as a beautifully poised, patient comedy of manners, in the tradition of the nineteenth- century English novels that Martin Amis’s college-age hero, Keith Nearing, is reading; then, in the last third, the narrative skips ahead and thins out and speeds up and starts to destroy itself joyously, like one of Jean Tinguely’s self-wrecking sculptures—or like civilization itself in the twenty-first century.

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  • review • June 14, 2010

    Nox by Anne Carson

    Sam Anderson

    Few things in this world have the power to make me clean my desk. One of them, it turns out, is Anne Carson’s new book-in-a-box, Nox. Before I even opened it, I felt an irresistible urge to spend twenty minutes purging my worktable of notes, napkins, magazines, forks, check stubs, unpaid bills, and fingernail clippings. The urge struck me, I think, for a couple of reasons. For one, Nox is unwieldy.

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  • review • June 10, 2010

    The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

    Michael Agger

    In his new book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind. He begins with a feeling shared by many who have spent the last decade online. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think," Carr tells us. "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading." He relates how he gets fidgety with a long text. Like others, he suspects that the Internet has destroyed his ability to read deeply. "My brain," he writes, "wasn't just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."

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  • review • June 09, 2010

    Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront by Nathan Ward

    Michael Washburn

    From the boozy, crusading priest in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, to Malcolm “Mike” Johnson, the New York Sun’s journalist-hero, to death by Murder Inc.’s ice pick, the New York City waterfront’s native criminality has been both root and branch of many enduring urban tropes. These ideas have by now been civilized, obscuring the fact that not long ago a reporter could write that the waterfront “produces more murders per square foot than does any other section of the country.”

    Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront, journalist Nathan Ward’s brisk, enthusiastic rendering of this dark

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  • review • June 04, 2010

    Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

    Graeme Wood

    For Americans of my generation—the wrong side of thirty, but too young to remember the golden age of student protest—the tales of youth offered by Christopher Hitchens in his new memoir may provoke somewhat more envy than we care to admit. A Trotskyite protester in Hitchens's salad days could enjoy the thrilling illusion that letter-writing campaigns and streetside invective might one day succeed in buckling the world order and building an epoch of peace on its ruins.

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  • review • June 03, 2010

    Light Boxes by Shane Jones

    Carmela Ciuraru

    The striking cover image of Shane Jones’s first novel, Light Boxes, is both playful and foreboding, an apt rendering of the novel’s offbeat charm. It reads like a twisted fairy tale. The story follows Thaddeus Lowe, who lives with his wife, Selah, and daughter, Bianca, in an unknown era, in an unnamed town where it is always February, presided over by a godlike character—also named February—who is responsible for the soul-crushing cold and darkness. He’s powerful and mysterious and orders “the end of all things that could fly,” a particularly harsh measure for townspeople who escape the gloom

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  • review • June 02, 2010

    Day for Night by Frederick Reiken

    Julie Orringer

    Frederick Reiken's complicated and absorbing third novel, Day for Night, opens as though it were a far more conventional book: On a trip to Florida in 1984, Beverly Rabinowitz, her boyfriend and his son go on a manatee-watching expedition; Tim Birdsey, their young guide, makes an unexpectedly deep connection with Beverly, and he brings her back to the river at night.

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2010

    Growing Pains

    In recent back-to-the-land memoirs, fresh food is just one reason to take up the plow. • Melanie Rehak

    In the 1980s, we had urban cowboys. Now, we have urban farmers. Where John Travolta in a cowboy hat and big belt buckle was once the emblem of a newly citified country boy, today trends lean in the other direction, with urbanites going back—partway, at least—to the land. Dressed in everything from Carhartt overalls to newly stylish Walmart Wellingtons, they’re a generation that finds itself longing for a connection through blackberries of the earthy kind.

    Some, like Manny Howard, whose My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm (Scribner, $25) chronicles the six

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