Reviews

March 22, 2013

Stars Are Just Like Us: On Christine Sneed and Celebrity Disparity 2

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As readers, we’ve become so jaded, so used to seeing celebrities crash and burn, perhaps even delighted to watch them crash and burn, that when they engage in something as unexceptional as adultery, we hardly care.

March 21, 2013

In the Wake of Speedboat: On Renata Adler’s 1976 Novel 2

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Scrolling through news bits and status updates between passages of Speedboat, I’m floored by how the novel reads as a somewhat verbose Twitter feed. That is, verbose for Twitter. Succinct for anything else.

March 21, 2013

Lives within Lives within Lives: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives 2

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There is, it seems, no end to the lives of Aleksandar Hemon.

March 20, 2013

The Navigation of Birds and the Balance of Cats : On Jessica Francis Kane’s This Close 1

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This Close is about the way the people evolve over time; the numerous faces any individual wears over the course of his or her life, and the near-impossibility of truly knowing anyone.

March 19, 2013

Lost in the Land of Self-Help: Mohsin Hamid’s How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 0

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Hamid’s flawed but beautifully written new novel follows the trajectory of a self-made man in an unnamed country.

March 12, 2013

Who Are We Without Our Stories? Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons 3

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The first twenty pages has the feel of a cable TV pilot, not the opening chapter of a literary novel. I even cast it in my mind, and became half-convinced that if I could just get Alison Janney to commit to play Helen, I could have it on HBO in time for the fall season.