fiction

Book Review: Denis Johnson’s Beautiful, Haunting “Train Dreams”

October 15, 2011
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In “Train Dreams” the world of beauty and terror is balanced as only our best writers have been able to balance those things.

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Book Review: Playing in the Shadows of the Modernist Giants

June 29, 2011
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The wily Enrique Vila-Matas remains wary but respectful of Ernest Hemingway and asserts his independence by going on his own self-consciously vaudevillian way—Juan Gabriel Vásquez is too subservient to elude the shadow of Joseph Conrad.

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Book Review: Roberto Bolaño —The Critic as Bomb Thrower

June 11, 2011
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This is adversarial criticism, with an eye on the martyred, fueled by grievances political and aesthetic — the return of the repressed as the comeuppance for the comfortable. No wonder Roberto Bolaño’s reviews garnered him fierce detractors as well as admirers.

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Book Review: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream — Updated

June 5, 2011
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Most great novels generate an organic imaginative vision rooted in a sense of inevitability in the way they unfold; Chris Adrian’s THE GREAT NIGHT loses some steam because it fails to coalesce, to concentrate its myriad energies.

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Book Review: The Pale King– David Foster Wallace Finds the Magnificent in the Mundane

May 24, 2011
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If you haven’t before had the keen pleasure of reading David Foster Wallace, THE PALE KING is a fine gateway drug. Its 550 pages are broken into 50 sections, each digestible on its own without reference to the larger work The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown, 560 pages, $29.99 By Michael de…

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Book Review: Of Childhood and State Terror

May 2, 2011
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Set in the beginning of the “Dirty War” of Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta in Argentina, a period characterized by assassination and disappearance, “Kamchatka” is a superb novel that refracts public, political events through the sensibilities of everyday life. Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras. Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne. Black Kat, Grove/Atlantic, 311 pages…

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Book Review — A Wilde Child Restored: Dorian Gray Uncensored

April 25, 2011
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Editor Nicholas Frankel is right to argue that familiarity with Oscar Wilde’s original manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray deepens its vision, suggesting that the 1891 novel is a far less morally reassuring tale than readers have thought. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition by Oscar Wilde. Edited by Nicholas Frankel.…

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Book Review: A Cinematic Russian Winter (Updated)

April 21, 2011
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Russian Winter is part mystery and part love story, drawing on the (overly) familiar tropes of each: the missing jewels, the deceived lovers, and so on. The material is not original, but it is workable and proffers plenty of Hollywood glamor. Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay. Harper Perennial, 496 pages, $14.99. By Nora Delany It…

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Book Review: Exploring “The Memory of Love” in postwar Sierra Leone

March 17, 2011
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In her second novel, Aminatta Forna gives us a moving story of the toll that the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone has taken and is still taking, years after it supposedly ended.

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Book Review: The Greatest Horror Novel of the 20th Century

March 16, 2011
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German author Ernst Weiss’s nightmarish vision of science gone mad in his 1931 novel Georg Letham is not rote Freudian; it is firmly in the social critique/ apocalyptic Darwinian mode.

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