Tag Archives: winter 2006

A FAITHFUL EXISTENCE: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence

Forrest Gander Shoemaker & Hoard ($24) by Elizabeth Robinson Forrest Gander’s book of essays A Faithful Existence complements the author’s poetry handsomely, opening the heuristic properties of Gander’s work into another genre. Yet “essay” in the normal sense of the word is perhaps an inappropriate word for what occurs in these writings; I prefer “assay,” which […]

THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality

Walter Benn Michaels Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company ($23) by Brigitte Frase On the television “reality” series Survivor, a group of people is dropped into a tropical wilderness and left to fend for itself with minimal supplies. The contestants are sorted into tribes, sometimes randomly, sometimes by age or gender. The tribes compete against each other […]

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A WHITE PIG

Jane Gentry Louisiana State University Press ($17.95) by Matthew Duffus Jane Gentry is a poet of formidable strengths, able to delicately intertwine speaker and place with her close attention to detail, and to create a clear connection between the subject and nature. In “A Human House,” the opening poem in her second collection, these strengths […]

ANGLE OF YAW

Ben Lerner Copper Canyon Press ($15) by Joyelle McSweeney The critic Jed Rasula offers a seminar on the Kafkaesque, focusing on the appropriation of Kafka as a trope of contemporary literature. The time may now be ripe for a course on the “Benjaminesque.” One can’t trudge three feet through a thick layer of contemporary poetry […]

THE DISAPPEARANCE: A NOVELLA AND STORIES

Ilan Stavans Triquarterly ($22.95) by Katie Harger Ilan Stavans, a well-known cultural critic and Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at Amherst College, offers an uncommon look into the merger of Latin American and Jewish culture in his new collection of fiction, The Disappearance. Describing in the book’s preface his intent to examine […]

ESCALATOR

Michael Gardiner Polygon ($22.50) by Spencer Dew “There are more escalators in Tokyo than in any other city in the world.” So begins this debut collection of stories about Japan from Scottish theorist-cum-storyteller Michael Gardiner. Automated staircases and sidewalks eliminate the need for human movement, which Gardiner equates with human decision-making. Japan, too, is a […]

THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL

Chris Adrian McSweeney’s Books ($24) by Kelly Everding Humankind’s attraction to end-of-the-world scenarios might indicate some underlying guilty consciousnesses—whatever we’re supposed to be doing here on earth, we’re not doing a very good job of it. Chris Adrian taps into that fear/fascination with his new novel, The Children’s Hospital, where the microcosm of a hospital becomes […]

Passion and Precision: An Interview with Clare Dudman

by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer Clare Dudman is a remarkable writer of mostly historical fictions who has garnered praise from The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly, among others. Her background as a scientist informs her work, but in unexpected ways. In her novel Wegener’s Jigsaw (published in the United States as One Day the Ice Will Reveal All of Its […]

AGAINST THE DAY

Thomas Pynchon The Penguin Press ($35) by Scott Esposito Thomas Pynchon's modern picaresques are best when they dazzle. His masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, remains his most staggering and compelling work because it eschews plot and character in favor of, in the words of Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books, "a tortured cadenza of lurid imaginings […]