Reviews
August 11, 2011
The Ties That Bind: David Whitehouse’s Bed 0
by Kevin Charles Redmon
We’re introduced to the Edes on Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three — that is, the number of days since Malcolm, after going on a real birthday bender, crawled into his childhood bed and, at the tender age of twenty-five, refused to leave.
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 5
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.
