Sam Tanenhaus on the efficacy of the New York Times Book Review: “Welcome to our podcast, with the caveat that this sick crew long ago abandoned the illusion that we have any insight to offer or even have a clue what we’re talking about.” The distorted-guitar quasi-punk theme song opening that tries so hard to […]
I thought our patience was tried by having to wait two years for the translation of The Curtain, but it took the Czechs twenty-two years of waiting to get the Unbearable Lightness of Being translated. (Via The Elegant Variation) Labels: Milan Kundera
When you become doubtful of the impact of stories upon culture, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories will cheer you up. Not because it is so clearly a book that has had an impact on the world (no, The Satanic Verses will fill that role), but because it’s a book that discusses, through […]
So Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Echo Maker. In a field without the literary power-sluggers of the year (like The Road by Cormac cheapest pharmacy in california McCarthy and Everyman by Philip Roth), Powers was the early favorite (and Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions was the oddball). […]
So the latest hyper-idiosyncratic vision of Will Self is out in the form of The Book of Dave. Summary: Deranged cabbie pens manuscript, buries the metal tablets in the backyard, and five hundred years later, after the apocalyptic flood, the tablets are unearthed and become the template for a new religion (sounds Mormonistic, but in […]
I’m very taken by Kelly Link’s new collection of short stories, Magic (for beginners), not the least because the title implies the genre: she writes otherworldly, magical stories, lying somewhere between Amiee Bender and Haruki Murakami. To read a story from the collection, check out The Faery Handbag (which won the 2005 Hugo and Locus […]
Publisher’s Weekly couldn’t give a more enthusiastic thumbs up for Kundera’s last book in a trilogy on the poetics of the novel: “It’s not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood.” For early takes, check out this early […]
So Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is #4 on Amazon.com right now and #8 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His shill is simple: Belief in God is irrational and religion has caused irreparable damage to society. Unfortunately, his ideas are a bit too simple. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay in the November issue […]
An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered – possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard […]
So I just finished McCarthy’s The Road last night. I didn’t mean to finish it last night, I meant to start it, but by midnight I was convinced that it was good enough to lose sleep over. And the rest of the book certainly didn’t disappoint. Here’s a few bullet-pointed thoughts: The most common dialogue […]
