Tag Archives: Summer 2020

Catfishing on Catnet

Naomi Kritzer Tor Teen ($17.99) by Aidan Bliss The emergent media targeting today’s young adult demographic will necessarily make some allusion to the internet and its perpetual reconstruction of social activity. Contemporary works inevitably cut away to text messages and social media, from John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars to Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. […]

The Melancholy of Maturity

Translation and Adaptation in Normal People, The Story of a New Name, and Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Sarah McEachern After Parasite’s win for Best Picture at the Academy Awards last year, Korean director Bong Ho asked in his acceptance speech for American viewers to “overcome the one-inch barrier of subtitles.” […]

Are Snakes Necessary?

Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman Hard Case Crime ($22.99) by Joseph Houlihan Co-written with Susan Lehman, a former editor at The New York Times, Brian De Palma's debut novel, Are Snakes Necessary?, is a fascinating exercise in genre—a minor work by a major cultural voice. De Palma has always been an obsessive stylist. His […]

Agency

William Gibson Berkley ($28) by William Corwin Continuously lurching forwards, backwards, and sideways, and steadfastly refusing to give the reader a moment’s respite, Agency is a 400-page car chase resting atop a giant mound of metaphysics and gender politics. What are we to do with this formula? Gibson’s prose has never been easy for those […]

Arias

Sharon Olds Knopf ($18.95) by John Kendall Hawkins Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a second visibility. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” The Primacy of Perception The opening line of […]

Conversations with
William T. Vollmann

Edited by Daniel Lukes University Press of Mississippi ($25) by Chris Via At this point, one cannot dismiss William T. Vollmann. Far from being a mere cult sensation with subversive inclinations and a penchant for publishing unwieldy books, Vollmann has in recent years made waves with unassuming reportage (Poor People, Imperial); a National Book Award-winning […]