Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is called “Let’s Read About Sex,” and apparently it’s caused a small stir. This is ironic because we’re at a stage in literary debate where the most original thing we could do with sex just might be to shut up about it.
The authors insist that the sexual revolution must have been error[,] for so many women are still imperfectly happy; witness how they suffer from ‘conflicts,’ from ‘problems.’
In Nelly Reifler’s new novel, we’re introduced to a diminutive protagonist with a good heart and a robust furry belly. A widower, and, yes, a mouse, H. Mouse loves his two daughters, Susie and Margo, with a profound and sometimes melancholy adoration. His campaign for State Judge, based on his generous philosophy that “we are, each of us, born in a state of grace and innocence,” has strong public support. In darker moments, though, when his past slips out from the shadows, it is hard for H to include himself in his belief “that no matter what someone may do,
In 1942, the literary quarterly Accent accepted James Farl Powers’s short story “He Don’t Plant Cotton,” his first published fiction. Powers was working then for a wholesale book company in Chicago, having dropped out of Northwestern because he couldn’t afford tuition. He wrote his editor that he hoped to quit his job, to “get away and, yes, you guessed it, Write.”
The Virgins, Pamela Erens’s subtle, accomplished second novel, is set at Auburn Academy, a New Hampshire boarding school. The book begins in the fall of 1979 and covers a single academic year in the lives of Aviva Rossner and Seung (“pronounced like the past tense of sing”) Jung, doomed lovers, reckless exhibitionists, exotic standouts in their starchy WASP surroundings. Aviva, with her gold jewelry, cowboy boots, and pretty face full of provocative makeup, and Seung, a champion swimmer and inveterate pot smoker, quickly become objects of school fascination: “even the teachers talked about them.” Only a few years before, neither
Between 1952 and 1957, Naguib Mahfouz did not write any novels or stories. This was not a case of writer’s block. Mahfouz, who had completed his masterwork, The Cairo Trilogy, in the early 1950s, later explained that he had hoped Egypt’s revolutionary regime would fulfil the aims of his realist novels, and focus public attention on social, economic and political ills. Disenchantment would drive him back to fiction, of a more symbolic and allegorical kind.
Edoardo Nesi never wanted to run a textile factory, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Nesi thought of himself primarily as a writer, but since the 1920s, his family had operated a weaving mill in the Tuscan city of Prato, and working at the mill was a rite of passage. So after flunking out of law school and rotating through a series of factory-floor positions as “assistant foreman in charge of raw materials, assistant technician in charge of mixing and blending fibers, assistant warehouseman … assistant everything, once all was said and done,” Nesi finally became the
Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head. The most recent has been the Icelander Sjón, whose work is unlike anything I had read, and very exciting. He was born in 1962 and published his first poetry collection when he was fifteen. He was a founder of the neosurrealist group Medúsa. He has published eight novels and books of poetry, plays, and librettos. He writes lyrics for the Icelandic singer Björk and was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics for the Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark.
Fleming’s Bond was a sadistic racial essentialist prone to rhapsodise about the “sweet tang of rape”. In contrast, Boyd’s Bond is a “careful” lover who is also careful about meting out violence: one assailant is coshed like a cow felled by a “humane killer”. His mission to the warring African state of Zanzarim doesn’t inspire dodgy racial observations.
At the heart of At the Bottom of Everything is Adam Sanecki, an appealing yet somewhat callow Ivy League graduate a few years out of school, living in his hometown, Washington. He has spent years trying not to think about his former best friend, Thomas Pell. Adam’s current antipathy extends to Thomas’s parents: he recalls with a wince that he had even, “one especially, unproud morning, turned and speed-walked out of Safeway because I’d seen Thomas’s dad, or someone who looked like Thomas’s dad, rooting around in the bin of red peppers.”
IN THE ACT documents five evenings of performances that took place in Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden, and in New York City. Conceived by artist Imri Sandström and curator Hanna Wilde and presented by the Swedish collective Högkvarteret, this collaboration—as the first page of the book boasts in all capital letters—“brought together a total of 44 Swedish and international performance artists, curators, and writers working within overlapping artistic domains across varied geographical spheres.” IN THE ACT is an extension of the performance work it documents, addressing many issues in contemporary performance, e.g. re-performance and citationality, the archive and documentation practices, the
The scariest thing about Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining, is the possibility that it will turn out to be dreadful. That fear dogs all sequels, and especially sequels to iconic stories—and, for fully fifty pages, King does little to dispel it. After a perfunctory update on Danny, now eight, we meet our new bad guys. These are a clan of vampirelike beings known, regrettably, as the True Knot. Not regrettably, though awfully Carl Hiaasen–y, they roam the country in RVs, clad in stretch pants and grandma-wear.
Years ago, a friend of mine attended a reggae concert where the lead singer asked the crowd, “Who wants to hear a song about Rodney King?” The crowd screamed “Yeah!” but the singer wasn’t satisfied. “I can’t hear you! Who wants to hear a song about Rodney King?” More yells, shouts, enthusiasm, but not enough. This went on for several minutes. Finally, when the crowd was going wild, the singer began: “R-r-r-rodney King, Rodney King, Rodney King, Rodney King!” Those were the lyrics to the entire song.
Over the past thirty years, Geoffrey O’Brien has devoted his attention to many subjects: He is the editor in chief of the Library of America, has published several volumes of poetry, and has surveyed a broad range of cultural provinces in books such as Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (1981) and Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears (2005). He has written about multiple art forms and genres, moving effortlessly from Heinrich von Kleist to comic books, from La Traviata to Burt Bacharach. And through it all, he has revealed his love for the movies,
In his 2000 memoir, Blood of the Liberals, George Packer mentions a post-collegiate encounter with one of his Yale classmates, a young right-wing pundit who had hired Packer—then dividing his time in Boston between carpentry jobs at construction sites and volunteer stints at a downtown homeless shelter—to build him a bookshelf. This was the mid-1980s, and the conservative was a young man in a hurry, tacking confidently into the post-liberal zeitgeist. He was “an apologist for radical laissez-faire economics and a kind of high-Tory moralism on social issues,” Packer writes, “with an attitude toward the poor of contempt mixed with
2500 Random Things About Me Too, originally composed on Facebook, consists of 100 lists, 25 supposedly random items in each bouquet; “random” is a term that Viegener gently interrogates during the course of this autobiographical recitation, which shuns the dungeon of “memoir,” a zone deemed sentimental because of its jejune sequentiality.
“How did you manage to get hotter with age?” asked a member of Reddit of Molly Ringwald earlier this year. “I drink the blood of Kristen Stewart,” Ringwald typed in reply. You could practically hear the applause.
Julia Moskin and Kim Severson. “The office can be a cold and lonely place.” So say the authors of CookFight: 2 Cooks, 12 Challenges, 125 Recipes, an Epic Battle for Kitchen Dominance (Ecco, $30). That they happen to be Julia Moskin and Kim Severson, food writers for the New York Times (Severson is now the […]
Marlo Thomas, star of the sitcom That Girl, which aired from 1966 to 1971. Women aren’t any less funny than men, but they are more sensitive to environmental cues. Where funny men might share an impressive ability to complete that imitation of a dog in heat or an anesthesia-free bowel resection whether they’re greeted with […]
I was lucky enough to know Elliott Smith a little. We both lived in LA for a while and spent many nights at the oldLargo nightclub in Hollywood. At the very end of the ’90s, Largo’s owner, Mark Flanagan, asked me to participate in a charity song swap to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I was to sit on a stage with Jon Brion, Fiona Apple, and Elliott. In the greenroom before the gig, Elliott, whom I had just met, was nervously mumbling about how lousy he was, that he didn’t belong on a stage with such great performers,
