Reviews
March 22, 2013
Stars Are Just Like Us: On Christine Sneed and Celebrity Disparity 2
by Carrie Neill
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
by Eric Dean Wilson
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
by Bill Morris
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
by Caroline Zancan
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
by Emily St. John Mandel
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
by Michael Bourne
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.