It’s been four months since the French writer Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, was released in English, and eight years since his first novel Whatever appeared on the scene. In that time he’s managed to make quite a bad boy image for himself, primarily by the excoriating insults in his novels […]
Milan Kundera’s new treatise on the novel – The Curtain – is being published in English in February 2007. Don’t miss this. Because not only is Kundera a master of the novel himself (Unbearable Lightness of Being, of course, but what about the Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?), but his analysis of […]
I found Marilynne Robinson through an essay she wrote in Harper’s critiquing evangelical religion. It was so dead-on I just had to read her second novel, Gilead. She pulled off a lovely voice, from a man at death’s door writing letters to his son, and also managing to have quite a few theological rumorings and […]
As if we aren’t inundated with enough advertisements – even at the beach, the dry drone of a bi-plane is followed by a banner – now comes product placements in novels (LA Times Article). Brands of lipstick, brands of cola, brands of T-shirts. Despite the poverty that attends the writing profession, I simply can’t swallow […]
