• print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

    Wore Stories

    In a memorable scene from Sheila Heti’s 2010 novel, How Should a Person Be?, the protagonist buys the same dress as her friend Margaux, which causes an argument via email: “after we looked at a thousand dresses for you—and the yellow dress being the first dress i was considering—i really was surprised when you said you were getting it too,” writes an angry Margaux. “i think it’s pretty standard that you don’t buy the dress your friend is buying.”

    This seemingly mundane disagreement over a dress—and over a symbolic claim to originality in an area where women are so scrutinized—encapsulates much

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

    Avant Guard

    John Cage’s avant-garde compositional procedures, which value chance and avoid deliberate meaning-making, have had nearly universal application in the arts—in painting, poetry, and, especially, dance. In Story/Time, a collection of performance texts and lectures that reckon with the composer’s influence, the renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones describes a 1972 encounter in tones of awe. More than the music itself—“the sounds were of nature in constant interactive flux with electronic drones, whirring, whines, tweets, and scraping metallic noise”—what impressed the young drama student was Cage’s

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

    Saving Doubts

    There are two versions of Charles D’Ambrosio running through this important essay collection, the first book to appear from the noted short-story writer since 2006. First, there’s literary journalist D’Ambrosio, whose job it is to visit peculiar places like hell houses, modular homes, and petty-crime scenes and have thoughts about them that are probably more interesting than they deserve. You don’t really care, reading this D’Ambrosio, how he got to be this thoughtful, conscientious, erudite, and so forth—you’re just glad he did. Second, there’s the D’Ambrosio who, across several essays, goes

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  • review • August 25, 2014

    Your Face in Mine: A Novel by Jess Row

    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.

    That said, the stories in Jess Row’s second collection, Nobody Ever Gets Lost (FiveChapters Books, 2011), recall one aspect of actual Chekhov. As with Chekhov, the more we know about Row’s characters, the

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  • excerpt • August 22, 2014

    Whatever Happened to St. Petersburg?

    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.

    But there, after the war, the

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  • review • August 15, 2014

    Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen

    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.

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  • review • August 11, 2014

    Panic in a Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

    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

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  • review • August 05, 2014

    The Anti-Court Court

    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.

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  • review • July 31, 2014

    A Sentimental Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet

    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.

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  • review • July 29, 2014

    In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds

    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

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  • excerpt • July 24, 2014

    An Air of Impoverishment and Depleted Humanity

    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

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  • review • July 21, 2014

    Fear by Gabriel Chevallier

    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.

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