Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars argues persuasively that humans are losing some kind of property rights struggle with creatures of the wild. He cites an extensive history of resolute and sometimes blatantly hostile real-estate invasion by beavers, Canada geese, wild turkeys, and white-tailed deer, all of which were once assumed to be picturesque and even lovable denizens of the dark and safely remote forest.
Dave Zirin’s new book hovers over the world of sports, galloping liberally from the players to owners, from economic inequality to gender inequality. He argues that politics “has returned [to sports] with a vengeance.” And he insists that “the stakes couldn’t be higher.”
The men in Jess Walter’s pungent new story collection, We Live in Water, are coming apart. These men — and they are exclusively men, save a few catalytic female characters — are what society (and ex-wives) commonly label disappointments. Trading in ill-considered choices, they have made a habit of letting folks down — their women, their kids, their friends, their creditors and, chiefly, themselves. Walter’s protagonists endure a buffet of self-inflicted misfortune, everything from meth addiction to dodgy parenting, often served in a combo platter with a side of unlucky in love. His characters are all searching, with varying levels
Since my fiction is usually about people, and I consider sex one of the more important and emotionally fascinating activities people undertake, sometimes I must run the gauntlet of writing a sex scene. The results vary, though I try to make a habit of not publishing the many occasions when things don’t work. “Don’t worry,” I console myself, stroking my arm. “It happens.”
How to classify Artful, the latest offering from Scottish writer Ali Smith? An introductory note declares the book to be a faithful adaptation of the four Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature she delivered at Oxford last winter, but Artful is far from a rigorous academic talk; its literary criticism comes in the form of a fictional soliloquy of yearning. The premise is this: In a house in London, a woman mourning the death of her partner turns to their shared library for distraction from loss, only to find that her beloved has come back, unannounced, for a visit. The
Courage to today’s aspiring rock star. In 1967, The Byrds could afford to be gently cynical about pop-music acclaim. After all, they’d made a fortune by transforming Dylan’s folk song “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a jangly pop tune delivered with a crooked smile. But what should an aspiring rock star do today?
“I wanted to rent a lion, but they said the insurance was too much,” Eddie Huang told me, offhandedly, one chilly afternoon late last year. We were discussing the four-minute TED talk he’s preparing to deliver at the organization’s annual conference this February, “I Dreamt of White Lions.” Its main point, according to Huang, who is a 2013 TED Fellow, is that “lions are the king of the animal kingdom like white people rule the world. But neither of those ideas have any power unless you give it.” He was hoping to illustrate his upending of the received wisdom by
Biographers of Sylvia Plath take on a daunting task: Who could ever write as much or as well about Plath as Plath did? Plath was obsessed with re-creating her life’s story, which she not only transmuted into poetry and fiction but wrestled with in a staggering volume of personal writing. In the overflowing margins of leather-bound pocket calendars, across thousands of pages of journal entries and letters, Plath described the minutia of her days sometimes down to the hour, sparing no one from her exacting, critical eye. Plath’s story can even be divined through an incredible store of the stuff
Los Angeles is traditionally where factoids become fables and get passed off as philosophy. The true mystical secret of Zen ideas in particular is that they’re stupid. California is pretty stupid, too—which means that warmed-over takeout Zen has done a good business there. Consider, just for instance, the success of the Nichiren Shōshū sect: Its promoters have melded simplistic Zen ideas with materialism, and throughout the ’80s, suburban Angelenos gathered in living rooms, all chanting for happiness and/or a new car. It worked, too: Lots of them did eventually get new cars.
In 1971, Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler announced his intention to “photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive, in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled.” His Variable Piece #70 was, unsurprisingly, never completed, but Huebler’s comprehensive cataloguing impulse is telling: It speaks of a desire to map the contours of civilization, to capture and behold the mass of humanity. What do we, collectively, look like? And how do we depict ourselves to ourselves?
It’s a sad time to be heterosexual. Men are angry at women, women are angry at men, and nobody’s getting the type of action they want. But here comes a book to solve all that, to clear away confusion, restore male dynamism, and rekindle the spark of chemistry in straight mating. The jacket copy of cultural historian Betsy Prioleau’s Swoon promises to reveal “surprising seductive secrets” of the old masters in the interest of giving the beleaguered modern man a leg up on the nigh impossible task of wooing a modern woman. Subtitled “Great Seducers and Why Women Love” them,
Perhaps the most famous single line in Guillaume Apollinaire’s body of work is the opening declaration of his 1912 poem “Zone:” “You’re tired of this old world at last.” “Zone” heralds modernity—with its urban setting, its montage of images (the Eiffel Tower, billboards, a “ghetto clock running backwards”), and its jump cuts through time and space. The poem marks a transition between the lyricism of a prior generation of French verse and changing ways of seeing and imagining fostered by the proliferation of new technologies of speed and mechanization. And yet, for all his weariness of the old world, Apollinaire
On November 18, 1978, more than nine hundred members of Peoples Temple church died in a mass suicide-murder in Jonestown, Guyana. It was a horrific epilogue to the dream of building a socialist utopia in the South American jungle. Jim Jones, the Temple’s charismatic leader, had promised his flock deliverance from America’s ills: racism, sexism, capitalism, and economic burnout. Instead, he controlled his city like a police state, enforcing a paranoid regimen of loyalty oaths, suicide drills, and brainwashing. His drug-fueled sermons, beginning in the evening and lasting until 2 or 3 AM, spelled out a doomsday scenario of CIA
“An old soul is the last thing you would expect to find inside Justin Bieber,” an old entry on his Web site says. “But all it takes is one listen to the 15-year-old soul-singing phenomenon to realize that he is light years ahead of his manufactured pop peers.” Mr. Bieber, now 18 and as big a pop star as ever, is the model for the 11-year-old with an old soul in Teddy Wayne’s sad-funny, sometimes cutting new novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine.
For many Americans, a great deal of contemporary life is mediated by interfaces, including laptop, smartphone, and television screens. That this perpetual mediation so often goes unexamined speaks to the importance of Alexander R. Galloway’s new monograph The Interface Effect. Galloway’s ambitious book aspires to be not only a theory of interfaces but also a broader rethinking of the field of “new media studies,” an academic discipline with precursors in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams in the 1960s that emerged properly with scholarship produced alongside the rise of web culture of the 1990s.
Oscar Wilde is famous for having found the Atlantic Ocean a bit of a letdown. “The roaring ocean does not roar,” he observed in 1882. But he would face tumult soon enough. Wilde was just twenty-seven, and about to embark on a year-long lecture tour of the United States that would throw him together with miners and socialites, undergraduates and poets, and set the ocean of the world roaring around him. He was young, dandiacal, theatrical, publicity-seeking—ridiculed and lionized on both sides of the Atlantic. In years to come he would glitter with fame and accomplishment, yet he would also
Poetry has always been the handmaiden of mythology, and vice versa. Sometimes poets are in the business of collecting and tweaking existing myths, as with Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the Poetic Edda. Other times poetry applies a mythological glamour to stories and characters from history, legend or even other myths (the hero of the “Aeneid” is a minor character from the “Iliad”). Then there are poets who equate the idea of myth with the supposedly irrational essence of poetry itself. Here is Robert Graves in 1948: “No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a
Kevin Killian is one of America’s great eccentrics, a stylist with so much pizazz that perhaps it’s inevitable he has been punished with under-recognition. His sentences are suffused with a folksiness that reminds one of the great southern writers, though his books are usually set in the California he has called home for the past several decades. In his latest novel, Spreadeagle, one of his characters relays the following: “‘Dogs and cats got two things in common,’ my mother used to say, ‘and one of them ain’t fit to mention.’ That always made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t even know
That crunching sound you hear is Lawrence Wright bending over backward to be fair to Scientology. Every deceptive comparison with Mormonism and other religions is given a respectful hearing. Every ludicrous bit of church dogma is served up deadpan. This makes the book’s indictment that much more powerful. Open almost any page at random. That tape of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, that Wright quotes from? “It was a part of a lecture Hubbard gave in 1963, in which he talked about the between-lives period, when thetans are transported to Venus to have their memories erased.”
Elena Ferrante, or “Elena Ferrante,” is one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers. She is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels, the most celebrated of which is The Days of Abandonment, published in Italy in 2002. Compared with Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon is a publicity profligate.
