Books
As monster fiction, “Vlad” has hints, now and then, of what “Talulla Rising” doesn’t aspire to. In the former, Carlos Fuentes peels back the familiar to provide glimpses of the genuinely horrific.
Irving Berlin fans will be pleased to see such items as the complete Jerome Kern letter, (written in 1925!) in which Kern writes: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. HE IS AMERICAN MUSIC.”
Poet Mel Kenne, like a desert ascetic, has pared away everything that is not essential -— no words have been wasted in the making of this collection.
Norman Manea’s compelling novel “The Lair” tracks the ambiguities, contradictions, and confusions of the exile’s psyche as he struggles to find footing in surroundings that are often unintelligible. It is a highly cerebral, labyrinthine book, filled with mystery, paranoia, and illegible codes.
Here you have it: Werewolves are horny, vamps merely thirsty. This, to be sure, is material to work with, as novelist Glen Duncan does. But I can’t help thinking about great nineteenth-century novels of involuntary transformation.
Book product, much like food product, is manufactured –- from its very inception, designed to make money by shameless pandering to mainstream taste.
You are hardly aware of the historical facts. Kate Grenville internalizes them so completely in her novel there is not a sentence that “stinks of history,” as a friend of mine once said about whole historical fiction genre.
Cultural Commentary — Northrop Frye at 100
Northrop Frye, inspired by the poet William Blake, demands that the critic be a warrior in a “mental fight,” articulating the liberating value of literature as a source of imaginative energy that generates possibilities.
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