Paul Beatty’s Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, voyages to Berlin in pursuit of collaboration with reclusive avant-garde jazzman Charles Stone. His search in the exotic precincts of Berlin allows for an ongoing rumination on a wide range of subjects. Alex Abramovich observes: And try as
David Bajo’s debut novel features mathematician Philip Masryk, who, despite two marriages, has carried on a longtime love affair with book conservator Irma Arcuri. She vanishes, leaving him her library of 351 books, of which she has written five: Within these volumes lay the clues to Irma’s disappearance
By any standard Robert Scheer, who currently edits TruthDig.com, is a highly regarded journalist working within the admirable tradition of American muckraking. Bringing his 40 years as a journalist to bear on an updated amplification of Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the military-industrial complex, Scheer offers what his
Historian Chalmers Johnson warns: Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. For example, the gimmicks the Pentagon uses to deceive, entrap, and sign up gullible 18- to 24-year-olds are anything but voluntary. Nick Turse
Small-press newcomer Two Dollar Radio offers up Rudolph Wurlitzer’s fifth novel, reportedly the author’s transmogrification of a screenplay of a modern-day western entitled Zebulon. The commentary on Wurlitzer’s first novel in more than 20 years finds critics falling all over themselves to commend this work.
If you have not been introduced to TomDispatch, the useful and informative web site edited by Tom Engelhardt, this anthology is a good opportunity to become acquainted. Among the many commentators in this book are Chalmers Johnson, Juan Cole, Rebecca Solnit, Mark Danner, Ruth Rosen, Jonathan Schell, Greg Grandin, Noam
As the title indicates, this 500-plus-page tome is taken from the notebooks that cinema titan Fellini kept by his bedside for more than 30 years. The director of classics La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, 8 1/2, La Strada, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and I Vitelloni, Fellini, who
This latest edition of Canongate’s Myth series has Sigmund Freud conversing with blind prophet Tiresias as he lays dying of cancer. In addition to Freud’s drugged retrospective, the Oedipal complex/myth is grist for this mill.
Jack London, best known for his beloved dog tales, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, was a deeply committed progressive voice, and this anthology makes a good argument for refreshing his relevance as a polemicist. Much-published Paul Berman, an aspirant to similar progressive credentials, blurbs: “Jack London
Man of letters and contrarian Ishmael Reed has a substantial body of literary work; this book anthologizes various of Reed’s op-eds for The New York Times and Playboy. Reed writes: In the following chapters, I mix it up with the media bullies. Lewis Hyde, before a meeting of
