This year’s Village Voice pick. I’d already written about the Le Guin collected stories and Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue,” so I chose Jeanette Winterson’s memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” I heard her read the other day and was moved by her account of writing her way out of depression. Depression was like […]
Read More ...Yearly Archives: 2012
Ursula K. Le Guin, American Novelist
It’s been fifty years since Ursula K. Le Guin sold her first short story. Since then her books have been read, taught, quoted, thrust upon acquaintances, put at the top of Occupy reading lists. Over the course of a long, unpredictable, idiosyncratic career, she has written contemporary fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and essays. But she […]
Read More ...Predicting the Nobel 2012
Among the Nobel favorites, those weather-beaten figures on the liar’s bench of literature, two names turn up every year side by side: the Canadian writers Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Munro (1931), the Vermeer of the short story, is known for her unparalleled prose. Atwood (1939), always more political, has moved from sharp-edged explorations of […]
Read More ...Homesickness Is a Universal Condition: A Talk with Halil Gür
There’s a kind of traveler who arrives one day in a new place and knows that this is where he was meant to be. Some crave the rush of New York. Others discover their inner Italian. Still others, with more watery blood perhaps, take a tourist trip to Holland and find that they have come […]
Read More ...Michael Chabon: Telegraph Avenue
“Telegraph Avenue” is unquestionably a Great American Novel, but at first glance you might not recognize it as such. Michael Chabon braids plot twists, extraneous details, and references to such low-culture manifestations as comic books and kung fu movies into his stories with an almost adolescent abandon. In America a new Chabon book is a major event, but outside the English-speaking world, his verbal extravagance and fond embrace of popular culture…
Read More ...A Brief Talk with Patti Smith
Customers are lined up down the stairs and out the door of the American Book Center on the Spui in Amsterdam. A few of them are holding well-worn LPs. But most of them—especially the kids in their twenties—are carrying copies of “Just Kids,” the wildly successful, award-winning memoir by the punk singer Patti Smith. On […]
Read More ...Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference
In nearly every story in “The Beautiful Indifference,” Sarah Hall achieves a fine balance of language and subject matter. Sometimes the sentences are introverted and brooding, the setting ominous. Sometimes the words are as stubborn and glowering as the characters they describe. Hall finds beauty in unlikely places: in a sudden outburst of rage, or […]
Read More ...How to Review Books by Women
No books by women on the short list for the Libris Prize? If it’s any consolation, the gender gap in recognition isn’t just a problem in the Dutch literary world. In a much-discussed recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, American novelist Meg Wolitzer brought up yet again the question of the divided audience. While women read books by men, many men, consciously or unconsciously, leave out the books by women, as if literature were a checkerboard floor that they could cross by stepping on only one color of the squares….
Read More ...Patti Smith: Just Kids
When twenty-year-old beatnik Patti Smith first moved to New York with Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her pocket, she fell in love with a boy named Robert Mapplethorpe. Later she would become a rock star, he a provocative photographer who aestheticized the gay male body. But in the summer of 1967 he was an art student in […]
Read More ...Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012
Adrienne Rich had immense formal skill as a poet. Combined with her wonderful ear for language, it gave her a rare ability to write poetry that is both beautiful and furious. Her lines at times hum with an anger so forceful it seems to generate static, as if the words are throwing sparks off the […]
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