Reviews
January 14, 2011
Cut and Dry: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes 5
by Kevin Nguyen
The first thing you have to do with Tree of Codes is figure out how to read it.
January 6, 2011
Death and the Small Screen: Sean Manning’s The Things That Need Doing 0
by Jordan Heller
Manning comes at death from the side, getting at the painful reality of the suffering through the soft lens of the television set in the background.
January 5, 2011
Tintin and the Death Drive: Tom McCarthy’s C 6
by Jacob Mikanowski
Since McCarthy has devoted an entire, brilliant work of criticism to the argument that we should treat the Tintin books as classics of world literature, it’s tempting to imagine C as recast by Hergé.
November 29, 2010
Only Evoke: Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall 4
by Holloway McCandless
A novel of 238 pages cannot carry that many literary precursors without sacrificing some momentum. It’s like pinning a plethora of antique brooches onto a starlet’s chiffon slip dress — the delicate fabric will droop, distort, and even rip under the weight of the anachronistic jewels.
November 29, 2010
The World is, In Short, Teenaged: Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies 8
by Jessica Freeman-Slade
Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies is a soaring ode to teenage dreams, every paradise and nightmare, and far and away the best book I’ve read in years.
November 26, 2010
Matt Taibbi’s Class Warfare is Truthy and Depressing 10
by Derek Teslik
Griftopia portrays America as a ghetto being looted by evil drug lords, but a simpler explanation of the financial crisis, to me at least, seems to be the economics of laziness and arrogance.
