Reviews
July 30, 2010
Äppärät-chic: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story 6
by Rayyan Al-Shawaf
Make no mistake. Super Sad True Love Story boasts two tormented but appealing protagonists locked in a deliciously tortuous love affair. It is indeed super sad, though thankfully untrue and difficult to imagine as prescient. The novel’s excesses are also its weaknesses.
July 21, 2010
An Infinite Frolic of His Own: Joshua Cohen’s Witz 9
by Jonathan Frederick Post
Joshua Cohen’s mammoth Witz is the new 800+ page novel to vie for your entire summer reading schedule; to make half your book club drop out; to inspire annotations, wikis, lexicography cults.
July 20, 2010
War Comes Home: Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise 0
by Josh Cook
Contemporary war, in America at least, is now defined as much by coming home as it is by shipping out.
July 16, 2010
At the Movies with David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet 10
by Lydia Kiesling
It’s hard for me not to imagine a reviewer in a nightcap with a hot cocoa and a Mitchell novel. He wiggles his toes at the pleasure of good fiction and thinks to himself, “This is a wow. You know who else was a wow?”
June 28, 2010
World Cup Reading: Books, Beers, Bars 5
by Jesse Tangen-Mills
It’s all a question of the right book for the right occasion. For some people, that occasion will be at a bar where you’ll hear the zizzing of vuvuzelas, the shouting of national anthems, the thumping of a jabulani. It’s hard to justify spending hours in front of the screen, drinking beer no less, unless, of course, you bring a book.
June 17, 2010
Paper Routes: Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists 3
by Yevgeniya Traps
Rachman wields prose that is fittingly functional, dispensing, for the most part, with unnecessary flourishes, efficiently doling out pertinent particulars with a simplicity that is so striking as to be deliberate.
