In reviews of works of fiction, the word “Chekhovian” tends to lie somewhere between “subtle,” “nonviolent,” and “boring.” If a story collection isn’t funny, it’s Chekhovian. If it’s wistful and no one smashes anything, it’s Chekhovian. Hearing the word makes one think that somewhere out there must be a hugely influential writer, Bill Chekhov, who lives in a constant state of lowkey sadness.
St. Petersburg used to be a familiar place for Russians and non-Russians alike. It is so recognizable—even clichéd—as a setting for the high drama and intrigue of nineteenth-century Russian literary classics that one recent Russian novel features a first-person shooter videogame called Dostoevsky’s Petersburg. As Petrograd, we know it as the cradle of the Revolution, the backdrop for Eisenstein; as Leningrad, the tale of its suffering during the murderous Siege of Leningrad by Nazi and Finnish troops in 1941-44 is part of the common tragic legacy of World War II.
There must be dozens of books on the Declaration of Independence written from every conceivable point of view—historical, political, theoretical, philosophical, and textual—but no one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one. If we read the Declaration of Independence slowly and carefully, Danielle Allen believes, then the document can become a basic primer for our democracy. It can be something that all of us—not just scholars and educated elites but common ordinary people—can participate in, and should participate in if we want to be good democratic citizens.
“So what is the prophet Cohen telling us? And why do we listen so intently?” Liel Leibovitz asks at the outset of A Broken Hallelujah, his moving portrait of the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. The author pursues the answers to these questions with the diligence and reverence of a religious scholar. Thank God. But Leibovitz recognizes that Cohen deserves more than mere rock biography, and so he structures A Broken Hallelujah around the premise that his subject is, indeed, a modern-day prophet.
Panic in a Suitcase is the story of Ukrainian immigrants who come to the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it would be reductive to call Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s extraordinary debut a traditional immigrant novel. Historically, immigrant novels have tended to be about motion, transition, adjustment. In The Rites of Passage, anthropologist Arnold van Gennup explained major life transitions as occurring in a three-fold progression. The first stage is separation, a departure from the familiar: You leave home, are forced out of childhood, change status. The last stage describes ownership and assimilation: you take office, mature, discover
From our current vantage, it’s not hard to acknowledge that one of the presiding spirits of early-twenty-first-century art is Ray Johnson’s. Collagist, painter, poet, and the originator of mail art, Johnson took up the appropriative strategies of Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns, infused them with John Cage’s ideas about Zen and chance, and energized the mix with his own brand of deadpan Conceptualism. The art he made beginning in the early 1950s until his death in 1995 purposefully merged artist, artmaking, and art object in ways that were once disquieting but are now considered routine. The strong strain of performativity
Had a Democratic president been able to replace Rehnquist and O’Connor, constitutional law today would be dramatically different. Affirmative action would be on firm constitutional ground. The Voting Rights Act would remain in place. The Second Amendment would protect only the state’s authority to raise militias, not private individuals’ right to own guns. Women’s right to terminate a pregnancy would be robustly protected.
By the time he was elected to the Académie française in 2004, Alain Robbe-Grillet had suffered a cruel fate: He had all the renown he could have hoped for but few readers to show for it. The literary movement he’d launched half a century earlier—the nouveau roman—had ground to a halt. The new novel— anti-psychological and anti-expressive, stripped of individualised characters, temporal continuity and meaning itself—was no longer new.
Each of Adam Foulds’s recent novels suggests a cloud chamber into which some physicist has introduced particles that won’t bond. In The Quickening Maze (2010), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, he portrays two real-life British poets: John Clare, the son of laborers, who dashes off odes to nature, and Alfred Tennyson, an aristocrat who composes meditations on philosophy and history. These writers couldn’t have stood further apart—and meanwhile other characters introduce additional disagreements—but Foulds makes everything come together. Now, with In the Wolf’s Mouth, Foulds ratchets the conflict up considerably. The novel takes place during World War II,
In Do Not Sell at Any Price, Amanda Petrusich visits the secretive, insular world of 78rpm collectors. The oldest version of the record, these 10-inch, two-song albums are increasingly hard to track down. Finding a matching turntable is a feat in itself. The scarcity has kept the number of hobbyists small, and their devotion to “the treasure hunt” fanatical. As Petrusich explains in the prologue to the book, excerpted here, her interest in 78s began as a nostalgic protest against today’s listening culture—“an antidote to the twenty-first-century deluge”—and culminates in her own self-initiation into the cult. If collecting is a
In the era before cheap air travel, those in the English-speaking world who wanted to taste authentic French village life read Gabriel Chevallier’s gently satirical novels, published between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s. “Clochemerle” and “Clochemerle-Babylon” were deft, wise and celebratory in what people thought of as the French style. On the town of Clochemerle, in the Beaujolais region, the issues of French politics, class difference and coming or past collaboration with fascism lay more lightly than did eccentricity, pride in local wine, cooking and love.
When the 13-year-old protagonist of Alberto Moravia’s Agostino learns about sex for the first time, the aha-moment does not last long. He listens to a peer matter-of-factly explain the anatomical workings of intercourse, and what used to be a hunch, tucked away in a corner of Agostino’s awareness, bursts into view and demands to be reckoned with. The new knowledge is like “a bright shiny object whose splendor makes it hard to look at directly and whose shape can thus barely be detected”—a simile of typical Moravian ingenuity. Light, that well-worn symbol of enlightenment, might reveal what’s hidden, but it
Within days of the publication of No Place to Hide, a photograph began circulating on the Internet that showed National Security Agency operatives surreptitiously implanting a surveillance device on an intercepted computer. After nearly a year of revelations about the reach of the NSA, this photo nonetheless seemed to come as something of a surprise.
The essays in Brian Dillon’s Objects in This Mirror restlessly consider aphorisms, art vandalism, slapstic comedy, the act of erasure, the art of the essay, the history of “ruin-lust,” and the careers of a handful of contemporary artists—pieces on such a variety of topics that it’s “easier,” Dillon notes in the book’s introduction, “to name some of the subjects I’ve written about that didn’t make it into this book than to try to imagine a rationale” for what did. The generalist risks the terms “dilettante, hack, dabbler,” as Dillon acknowledges. “But there is also a tradition—let us call it essayistic,
If I chose to look at my life through a particularly self-critical lens, my personal narrative would boil down to the story of a woman who spent her entire adulthood trying to get good at something, anything. Beginning in my twenties and with no noticeable talent besides writing, I took classes in a string of leisure-time activities that I hoped would turn into something to love. I have no natural grace, but I tried clogging, then folk dancing, then swing dancing, then tap. I’m not especially artistic, but I took pottery classes and quilting classes. I tried learning Spanish, I
Some years ago, when my first child was finally old enough to sit through a book that (a) was not made of cardboard and (b) had more than four words on a page, I raided the bookshelves of my childhood bedroom with glee. Narrative, at last! All my old favorites were there—the Wizard of Oz books, The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, In the Night Kitchen. I loaded them into a bag and brought them home, and we started right in. Among the spoils was a picture book that had faded from my memory over the
According to novelist and critic Matthew Stadler in his new book, Deventer, the Netherlands has long been a place where “homeless drunks” debate museum design in soup kitchens and “housewives have opinions about architects.” It was from this localized foundation that Dutch architecture gained, in the last few decades, unprecedented international attention, as architects like Rem Koolhaas rose to prominence and shook up the status quo. There’s no better setting, then, for a book that believes sincerely in architecture’s potential to change the world.
SIGMUND FREUD THOUGHT most narcissists were either homosexuals or women. Attractive female narcissists were the “purest and truest feminine type.” “Such women have the greatest fascination for men,” he wrote. According to Freud, infants are total narcissists, because they can’t get inside anybody else’s head. They demand everything and are outraged when it doesn’t arrive. Freud used the phrase “His Majesty the Baby.” (It’s in English in the original.) Parents put up with these demands because they are sad they can no longer make them. They shield their children from the truth: Life is frustrating. You’ll never get all you
Proclaiming oneself “truly humbled” often signals that one could use much more humbling, preferably via a knuckle sandwich. Yet self-serving announcements of humility have become the posturing trend of the moment among celebrities. Leo DiCaprio is “deeply humbled” by his Oscar nomination. Kanye West is humbled by the love of his fans. Ridley Scott is “truly humbled” by his recent knighting. In modern parlance, humility is the natural outcome of a crowdsourced tongue bath.
The stunt book is a great American genre. For reasons of capitalism and lack of imagination, however, the stunt-writing industry took a sad tumble a while back, just about 118 years after Nellie Bly set out to travel around the world in under eighty days. Picture it: The year was 2007, and A. J. Jacobs published The Year of Living Biblically, while Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, began living eco-consciously (though his book wasn’t published until 2009, by which time the planet had already failed to be saved). “The whole ‘Set Time Period During Which I Tried To Make
