print • Feb/Mar 2007
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- print • June/July/Aug/Sept 2006
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- print • June/July/Aug/Sept 2006
Roberto Bolaño died (of liver failure) in 2003 at the age of fifty; he died in Spain, exiled from his birthplace, Chile. Much remains mysterious about his life. He had bad teeth. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He was arrested by Pinochet’s police. He wrote two impossibly long novels—his last, called 2666, is over one thousand pages long—and many poems; neither of the novels, and none of the poems, as far as I know, has yet appeared in English translation. He remains, for readers marooned in English, an unfolding discovery: New Directions, our savior, has published his
- print • June/July/Aug/Sept 2006
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- print • Apr/May 2007
Creation myths fascinate us because they point to the time when things began to become as they are, and so suggest that we might go back and choose a different, better path. “The universe comes to be at the moment when God wills it to be,” John Crowley writes in Endless Things, the concluding volume of his four-part series, Ægypt. “It never existed before that moment, and after that moment it always did.” Now that the series is finally complete, this is rather how Ægypt—twenty years in the making—itself feels: as if it had been there all along, and Crowley
- print • Apr/May 2007
Forget Internet dating: Any city dweller who’s spent an afternoon walking a cute pup down the street will tell you that owning a dog is the surest way to make and sustain a connection. In Cathleen Schine’s meringue-light new novel The New Yorkers, canines of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of lovability unite a disparate collection of Manhattanites living on the same charming, rent-controlled street, an easy dog walk from Central Park. It’s an ordinary Upper West Side street that escaped gentrification, a street where people moved after graduating college and never left.”There are no mansions there, no narrow houses
- print • Apr/May 2007
Jim Crace opens his ninth novel, The Pesthouse, in a place not unlike what Greil Marcus once called “the old, weird America,” a nation of folk traditions and superstitions, of bindle stiffs and highwaymen. This is the land of Boxcar Bertha, the country Mark Twain captured in the river odyssey of Huck and Jim. It’s a mythic territory, dark and apocalyptic, one that seems forever lost to us beneath the slick culture we now occupy. For Crace, however, the old, weird America is not just where we’ve been but where we’re going. It’s our history and our destiny all in
- print • Apr/May 2007
Maxine Swann’s writing career began with a bang in 1997, when her short story “Flower Children”—her first ever published—appeared in Ploughshares, won a series of prestigious awards (including an O. Henry and a Pushcart Prize), and went on to appear in The Best American Short Stories of 1998. Now her much-anticipated second novel, Flower Children, is out—the first chapter of which is the story as it appeared in Ploughshares a decade ago.
- print • Apr/May 2007
The Buenos Aires of Nathan Englander’s harrowing and brilliant first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, is a city of disappearances. Names are effaced from gravestones, unseemly family histories are denied, plastic surgery distorts familial resemblances. Students are imprisoned; some may become victims of the vuelos de la muerte, or “death flights”—the tortured dissidents sedated and thrown from planes into the estuary that runs past the city into the Atlantic Ocean. Pato, the sweet-natured but rebellious teenage son of Kaddish and Lillian Poznan, is taken from their home one evening by a group of armed men, in front of his
- print • Apr/May 2007
“What was it my father used to say?” Sepha Stephanos asks. “A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on two wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.” Sepha, the narrator and unlikely hero of Ethiopian émigré Dinaw Mengestu’s first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, has endured seventeen years of exile by the time he arrives at this revelation. After two decades lived between worlds, the hope and optimism that Sepha brought to
- print • Apr/May 2007
Among the aftereffects of 9/11 has been the institutionalization of a new and radically different kind of fear, far more encompassing in its reach than the old fears (of drugs, gangs, black parolees, feminists) cynically evoked by politicians and the media. In its fluent persuasiveness—you have to accept at least the possibility of another attack—fear of terrorism puts otherwise quite rational people at odds with their long-held convictions and better judgment, and it justifies the distrust and hatred of foreigners and immigration, unfamiliar religious beliefs, due process, and, generally, liberalism.
- print • Apr/May 2007
That Clare Clark is the author of a critically acclaimed first novel titled The Great Stink should make perfect sense to readers of her second offering. Set largely in the malodorous backstreets and poorly ventilated chambers of early-eighteenth-century London, The Nature of Monsters, like its predecessor (which explores the city’s sewers a century later), is a distinctly pungent reading experience—one in which the “powerful stink of pig shit and rotting refuse” mingles with foul-smelling tisanes, decomposing elixirs, and canals choked with “dung and dead cats” to form an olfactory edifice so impressive it easily displaces the frequently evoked dome of
- print • Apr/May 2007
The boy protagonist in Phil LaMarche’s roiling debut novel, American Youth, is tough and lonely in the manner of Russell Banks’s lost-kid hero in Rule of the Bone. Ted LeClare’s detachment from his peers is set against the backdrop of his family’s—and the region’s—economic dislocation, and LaMarche renders the culturally barren New England landscape with language that is both portentous and propulsive.