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Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.
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Not terribly surprised.
All this explains why David Mamet, America’s most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in which he announced that he had “changed my mind” about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of “a host of conservative writers,” among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called “our greatest contemporary philosopher”), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that “a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”
On balance, I suppose that if you’re more interested in describing your world as you find it than in wanting to aspire to make it better, liberalism probably isn’t for you.
Perhaps one day I’ll open an essay with a sentence this perfect.
Between The Fifth Column, the play which makes the occasion for this large volume, and The First Forty-Nine Stories, which make its bulk and its virtue, there is a difference of essence.
So many things that these few words do. On a purely functional level they define the difference between two bodies of work and and render judgment on them, while still intriguing the reader to know more despite the fact that judgment has been rendered (and thus the ostensible purpose of the review fulfilled). But then on a less superficial level they communicate–Hemingway! He is over the hill now, and I’m about to tell you why, while still demonstrating that I grasp the virtues of his youth and maybe even can tell you how he lost his way.
You can read the rest in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.
 The National has published my review of Urdu-language author Qurratulian Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist. Hyder, who penned a book many have called Urdu’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, has clear talent, but Fireflies is perhaps not the best book to show it off. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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So Amazon has unveiled a new Kindle that goes as low as $139. (Not exactly sure where the $139 one is on the site, but I’m sure if you want it you’ll find it.)
One thing to note is that, so far, Amazon is sticking to its guns vis a vis color and touch-screen:
That kind of price point could make Kindle attractive to the mass market consumer. But anyone hoping for a color display or touch screen will have . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Canada’s Walrus magazine has a summer fiction issue, with some noteworthy offerings. There is Ilustrado author Miguel Syjuco here, and recently Booker nominated Lisa Moore (for February) here.
One of the arguments often made on behalf of translated fiction is precisely that it provides us an avenue of increased acquaintance with “foreign” cultures, but a book like Natural Novel often seems to reflect our own culture back to American readers, both in literal references to American culture (“Remember how in Pulp Fiction Bruce Willis goes back to get his watch and decides to toast Pop Tarts, while Travolta is reading in the john?” one man asks another in a conversation about toilets) and in its fragmented and self-conscious narrative devices, most of which seem to me to derive primarily from American postmodernism–indeed, while writers like Calvino and Borges are among the original inspirations of literary postmodernism, that inspiration was initially and most fully expressed in postmodern American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Issue 8 of The Critical Flame is online now, including a review of Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou:
This passage is indicative of the novel’s irreverent style and reveals Mabanckou as the rare kind of writer who can incorporate high literary allusions as well as bawdy humor. Mabanckou draws heavily on his predecessors as he pursues this project, and it is perhaps one of the most notable characteristics of Broken Glass that it is absolutely littered with literary allusions. French writers from Rimbaud to . . . continue reading, and add your comments
 At The Constant Conversation, Soo Jin Oh has penned Amazon Partners Up with Possibly the Most Hated Man on the Literary Scene. She delves into why Andrew Wylie has decided to try and be a “publisher”: . . . continue reading, and add your comments
 Our latest piece at The Quarterly Conversation is Lauren Elkin’s essay on Jeanette Winterson. It’s all about how Winterson’s books trace out an interesting relationship to reality, and how that reality is transmuted into her work. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it. |
Priorities
Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet
Tom Cruise Kills Your Sales?
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
You Say