Essays
September 10, 2010
Stieg Larsson: Swedish Narcissus 97
by Janet Potter
In any other book, I would see these tactics as pandering to the baser instincts of the reading public. But in this book, in which Mikael is so obviously a stand-in for Stieg, it’s just tacky. Especially since this Stieg/Mikael amalgamation has also appointed himself head of the Respecting Women Committee.
September 10, 2010
Reading Just for Pleasure 13
by Chris Graham
While it is plainly true that one can read a book more or less closely (substitute a beach blanket and a daiquiri for a pencil and a desk), it is equally true that something of everything we read is retained, to be recalled, by chance more often than design, on some or another future occasion, a dinner conversation, a tutorial essay, or a game of Trivial Pursuit.
September 9, 2010
How China Miéville Got Me to Stop Worrying and Love the Monsters 32
by Bill Morris
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the novel. Was it just a delicious stew of weirdness? Was it an allegory about the need for solidarity among the underclass as it fights prejudice and oppression? Whatever it was or was not, the book whetted my appetite for more.
September 8, 2010
Is Big Back? 22
by Garth Risk Hallberg
A mini-boom in big books would seem to complicate our assumptions about the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span.
September 1, 2010
Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction 12
by Edan Lepucki
As a white reader, I’m simultaneously made to understand the experience of slavery, and I also must wrestle with how I’m implicated in that past.
August 26, 2010
Oral History at the End of the World: World War Z and its Cousins 3
by Darryl Campbell
World War Z is not a shallow book by any means. But World War Z never quite manages the same level of moral pique as The Good War and the now obscure former bestseller Warday, a bleak speculative oral history of America after a nuclear attack.
