Essays
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.
August 23, 2010
Beauty, Youth, and Their Discontents 1
by Ujala Sehgal
Fictional characters enjoy exaggerated attributes, but few have the sort of beauty that marks Julien Sorel, where the beauty is not only essential to his character, elevating his soul, but outside of it, dictating his destiny. If beauty can be distilled from its specific fictional forms, does it have a cogent power of its own in literature?
August 20, 2010
On Coincidence, Love, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being 6
by Bezalel Stern
Death is hidden somewhere in the middle of the book, and it doesn’t mean a thing.