Reviews
March 29, 2013
I Await The Devil’s Friend Request: On Social Media and Mary MacLane 15
by Emily St. John Mandel
What participation in social media comes down to, I think, is that either you have an instinct for broadcasting your life, or you don’t. Mary MacLane would have been a natural.
March 28, 2013
Men Handling Things: On Stuart Nadler’s Wise Men 0
by Janet Potter
I can’t say whether I was enjoying the book itself or just the true American, grand tradition of it all. Surely I’m reading a great book, I thought, a rich man with a diamond watch is staring at the ocean while his son looks on and doubts it all!
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.