Inter Alia
August 28, 2008
Inter Alia #12: Tell No One I’m A Literary Snob 2
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Film critics have lauded the French thriller Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) with adjectives fit for a personal ad: “taut,” “sexy,” “smart…” Having recently caught a matinee, I’m willing to attest to its tautness. However, the climax reminded me that dramatic smarts entail more than a pensive hero and a Gallic pedigree. [...]
June 10, 2008
Inter Alia #11: The Death and Life of Literary Spaces 1
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Last week, Manhattan’s Mercantile Library emptied the shelves of its shambling, elegant midtown mansion and locked the doors for good. The Merc, one of Old New York’s several private libraries, had occupied its East 47th Street location continuously since 1932, but could no longer outrun the fiscal exigencies of arts funding and NYC real estate. [...]
May 15, 2008
Inter Alia #4: International Prizewinners and the Business of Translation 5
by Garth Risk Hallberg
[Editor's Note: To plug a hole in the Inter Alia series, we've numbered this one out of order.] I know next to nothing about the translation business, except that it is vital to my reading habits. And so, earlier this week, I posted a little survey of international awards for fiction, along with the unobjectionable [...]
March 30, 2008
Inter Alia: Authority, an Anniversary, and Book Reviewing 4
by Garth Risk Hallberg
In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a fungus that grows on another fungus; a nuclear reaction fueled by the byproducts of nuclear reactions; and movies whose audiences watch an audience watching them. For this kind of derivative process, he invokes the adjective annular, which the O.E.D. defines as “ringlike” or circular, but which presumably [...]
February 28, 2008
Inter Alia #9: The Aquarian Age is All the Rage 2
by Garth Risk Hallberg
A few weeks back, in a review of Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance, I remarked upon the recent proliferation of novels about the counterculture of the 1960s and about its turn toward violence. The book reviews in this week’s New Yorker would seem to confirm the trend. The lead item in the “Briefly Noted” column concerns Susan [...]
February 18, 2008
Inter Alia #8: Whither the Short Story? 10
by Garth Risk Hallberg
I.In the ongoing conversation about the future of literature, novelty is a rare thing. For at least forty years, American novelists and critics have been worrying about the fate of the novel – and of reading itself – and though the finer points of the argument have changed, the basic contours have stayed remarkably constant. [...]