Reviews
August 9, 2011
Ham Steaks and Manstarch: Nicholson Baker Returns to the Sex Beat 4
by Bill Morris
House of Holes is a carefully constructed contrivance, a vehicle for exploring a fantasy that could exist only in a country that’s both obsessed with sex and deeply conflicted about it. In short, it’s every pubescent boy’s wet dream. But is it good fiction?
August 5, 2011
A Surrealist’s Guide: Christopher Boucher’s How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive 3
by Emily St. John Mandel
Christopher Boucher’s strange and dazzling debut novel concerns a young man whose girlfriend gives birth to a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle.
July 29, 2011
A Thousand and One Knights: George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons 12
by Janet Potter
Seabiscuit wasn’t about a horse. You don’t have to like football to love Friday Night Lights. A great narrative is great in any genre, and A Song of Ice and Fire is perhaps the most compelling, fully realized narrative in modern literature.
July 25, 2011
Edouard Levé’s ‘Suicide’ and Edouard Levé’s Suicide 4
by Mark O'Connell
To write a book about a suicide, to call it Suicide, and to then take your own life before its publication is, whatever else it is, a way of exerting an overpowering influence over how that work is received.
July 22, 2011
The Second Life of Irmgard Keun 6
by Emily St. John Mandel
The German novelist Irmgard Keun’s life was the stuff of fiction: she was a best-selling debut novelist at twenty-six, published a second bestseller a year later, was blacklisted by the Nazi regime and in exile by the spring of 1936. She was possessed of a spectacular talent. She managed to convey the political horrors she lived through with the lightest possible touch, even flashes of humor.
July 20, 2011
What Ever Happened to the New Atheism? 25
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Five years ago, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens launched a jihad against religion. But their colleague A.C. Grayling’s new “Humanist Bible” suggests something surprising: maybe the quarrel wasn’t really with God after all.