Reviews
June 21, 2007
Cold and Ruminating: A Review of In the Wake by Per Petterson 0
by C. Max Magee
Scott of Conversational Reading invited me to participate in his “Reading the World” series this month. My contribution was reading and posting about Per Petterson’s In the Wake.
I don’t read enough fiction in translation, maybe a couple of books per year. When I do the experience elicits one of two reactions. Either [...]
June 19, 2007
Learning Curve: A Review of Nell Freudenberger’s The Dissident 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Nell Freudenberger is unquestionably a gifted writer and will, if we’re fortunate, become a major one. Her story collection Lucky Girls, published when she was 28, earned ink from Vogue and Elle and hardware from PEN, and if Marisha Pessl has since eclipsed her as lit-fic’s “It Girl,” well… so much the better. [...]
June 5, 2007
The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: June 2007 1
by Corey Vilhauer
The travelogue. Ah, the oft maligned travel novel, thrown onto the burn pile with other not-taken-seriously genres like mystery and thriller. Driven to the edges of respected literature, called unimaginative and easy, dropped first from a library’s collection and left to rot on library sale tables.
Yet, it seems like everyone wants in the [...]
June 4, 2007
Voices From The Past: A Review of Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje 2
by Andrew Saikali
“No story is ever told just once… We will return to it an hour later and re-tell the story with additions and this time a few judgments thrown in. In this way history is organized.”
In 1978, and again two years later, Michael Ondaatje left his Toronto home and embarked on an ancestral odyssey – [...]
May 28, 2007
In Profile: A Review of Reporting by David Remnick 1
by C. Max Magee
My New Yorker is David Remnick’s New Yorker. The magazine was around my house off and on when I was young. My sister and I, ignoring the witty captions, used to use the magazine’s iconic cartoons as a sort of coloring book, spicing up a droll bedroom scene with our 24-color set of [...]
May 21, 2007
Never Mind the Golubchiks: Some Notes on Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx 4
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Don DeLillo has said that his mammoth Underworld emerged from the juxtaposition of two headlines on the front page of a 1954 New York Times. One trumpeted a pennant-winning home run by the Giants’ Bobby Thomson. The other announced that the Russians had tested their first atomic bomb. Each, in its own [...]
