Tom Rachman’s debut novel The Imperfectionist (Dial Press) obviously makes use of his newspaper experience working at the Associated Press as a reporter in Sri Lanka and India, and as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Perhaps it’s my inattention, but Rachman’s fictional international,
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead) is, of course, a gifted novelist and a highly-regarded mentor at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. She is no stranger to nonfiction, having published two collections of essays, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. Now comes Absence of Mind (Yale University Press) in
When I received notice of Dalkey Archive Press’s Summer sale, it reminded me I just don’t do enough for those noble publishing houses like Dalkey, Archipelago, and Open Letter, all of whom publish excellent and important literature from around our troubled planet—in other words, literature in translation.
Poet Paul Guest (My Index of Horrifying Knowledge) was permanently paralyzed in a bike accident at the age of 12, which, as Mary Karr points out, “is the least interesting thing about his work.” In “User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation,” he alludes to his situation: Guest’s new book,
Leslie Jamison certainly has some weighty credentials—though I am in a quandary as to which element of her neophytic novelist capsule-bio/gestalt moved me to pick up her debut novel, The Gin Closet (Free Press). I am even considering the subliminal connection to my reading of Dan Okrent’s
As I write this, the honorable literary organization PEN is holding its Sixth Annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, which is a thing of wonder and joy if you are proximal to the universal center of ambition (or are inclined to transport yourself there) and you are a devotee
One wonders what it takes to staunch the hemorrhaging of originality from cultural conversation—in this case, the overuse of Yadda-Yadda-Nation this or Blah-Blah-Planet that? The clichéd title being the only complaint I can raise with this compendium of 29 dissident texts entitled Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century
I know novelist Cathleen Schine (The New Yorkers) to be a talented and amusing writer, but somehow I have never been attracted to her stories. Her new novel, The Three Weissmanns of Westport (FSG), is reportedly an homage to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—which makes me wonder what
Such are the caprices of the book world that the intersection of art and commerce occasionally produces interesting distractions and ambiences (sic). Given the Darwinian forces (natural selection?) at play in the publication of books (more so with literary fiction), there are frequent efforts to advance a back story in
Having succumbed to the old-fashioned precept that a liberal education was useful for more than vocational guidance and career enhancement, I chose to study philosophy as an undergraduate, more specifically various tributaries of logical positivism that flowed from that Amazon river of 20th-century philosophy, the Vienna Circle. Of course one
Though I tend to have difficulty in talking with the concision this space requires about story collections—not that you need to know my problems—in some ways that mirrors the difficulties and perils of short-form fiction. Both practitioners and non-practitioners (novelists) alike point out the rigor and economy demanded
Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel Mr. Shivers (Orbit) made its way into the scrum of books that have taken over the room where I sleep. I am not aware of anything previously written by Bennett or what prompted me to procure the book from his publisher. Or, over this past
Of our planet’s largest species I understand why the whale receives more attention than the elephant. The Megaptera Novaeangliae, after all, has Herman Melville to once and forever create a metaphor and narrative to enchant homo sapiens while we busily eradicate big mammals from our ecosphere. Pachyderms have no
A number of Canadian authors of my acquaintance—Gil Adamson, Wayne Johnstonand, Michael Ondaatje—have sung the praises of Newfoundlandian writer Lisa Moore (Alligator). Now comes her second novel, February (Black Cat), and I am pleased to report I can see that the awards and accolades are justified. Based on
My temptation to refer to Lee Eisenberg’s (The Number) career as “storied” was tempered by a sudden echo of George Orwell’s famous “Politics and the English Language,” in which he proscribed, “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in
There was a time in the mid-’90s when I found myself interviewing a long skein of Roddys, Patricks, Colums, and Seamusi (sic)—I reached the scientifically indefensible but understandable conclusion that there was a storytelling gene and these Irish lads were disproportionately gifted with it. Young Trevor Byrne’s
Since 2005, Scottish publisher Canongate has been building The Myths, a series of books matching well-regarded authors from all over the globe—Margaret Atwood, Karen Armstrong, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Su Tong, Salley Vickers, Jeanette
When it was first published, who would have expected (least of all Rupert Murdoch, who owns the publishing house) that A People’s History of the United States of America: 1492-Present (Harper Collins) would sell over a million copies. When I spoke with Howard Zinn in 2003, during one of
Short fiction is on my mind today. Michigan mortician turned writer/poet Thomas Lynch (The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade), whose family business most certainly has allowed him to view life from a most unusual perspective, has a new opus, Apparition & Late Fictions, his first venture into
Nick Tosches’s restless curiosity trods a wide literary terrain, and his formidable talents cross boundaries and barriers that might restrain lesser minds. He has written extraordinary (and perhaps definitive) profiles of Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire and Dean Martin in Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams
In military and diplomatic circles small wars are operations undertaken under executive authority within certain parameters. In the case of my insights and perambulations for this day, Small Wars (Harper Collins) is the title of British writer/screenwriter Sadie Jones’s (The Outcast) second novel set (mostly) in a British
Alabama-born Andre Williams migrated to Chicago with his parents only to be returned to the South when his mother died in 1943. Finding that comeback infelicitous, he made his way back to his steel-mill-worker father in the Windy City, which is where his troubles began—a brief stint of juvenile
If he never published another book, music commentator and cultural historian David Hadju most certainly made his bones with Lush Life, his incomparable biography of the great Duke Ellington collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Of course he has continued to publish valuable books—Positively 4th Street, The Ten-Cent Plague, and now Heroes
OK, first, my initial impression of cartoonist Hans Rickheit’s new book The Squirrel Machine (Fantagraphics) was one of amazement (a word I don’t bandy about indulgently) and bafflement. I am clear I am not grasping something—not an unpleasant feeling in this circumstance. But Rickheit doesn’t do
You might think that receiving rave endorsements from writers such as Milan Kundera (“one of the greatest novelists of our century”) and John Updike (“a master of verbal burlesque…one of the profoundest late moderns” [whatever that means]) would earn Witold Gombrowicz more recognition. More of a following? T-shirts with
Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto first called my attention to the distinction between residence and citizenship, pointing out that in France, living in Paris makes you Parisian, not French. I am almost tempted to say the same about residents of New York: New Yorkers first, United States citizens second. Such is
Back when I was an impressionable undergraduate (as opposed to being an impressionable graybeard), I was heavily into German author Herman Hesse (Siddhartha), devouring his oeuvre and other big chunks of world culture (I should add certain drugs were experimented with, in addition to those that I inhaled). In Hesse’
There is already a Tabernacle-size choir singing the praises of Attica Locke’s first novel. Among others, the inestimable James Ellroy and my old pal (I mean that in a Facebook kind of way) George Pelecanos extol Black Water Rising (Harper Collins) as a stylish, involving literary thriller with a
There must be some explanation for the fact that it wasn't until 2008 that someone had the clarity of thought to anthologize their well-considered selection of the best writing on the internet. Possibly it is that whatever cabal decides these things was finally overwhelmed by the torrent of
Growing up in Chicago in the '50s and '60s, I was not aware of this sprawling prairie city's commitment to racial segregation until Martin Luther King came to the city and led marches for fair (desegregated) housing in Caucasian neighborhoods. For such temerity, the good doctor
Ginnah Howard (Rope & Bone) manages to make the harrowing and bitter world of a shattered family (suicide of the father and one brother and the perennial cycle of substance abuse and various rehabilitations of the remaining brother) convincingly interesting. Set in upstate New York, the story alternates between Mark--the
