Category
Reviews
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The Hypochondriac’s Complaint
“Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient’s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance.”
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Graphic Fables of Old New York
Two recent books serve as potent reminders of the ongoing historiographic obsessions of graphic narrative. Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn and Mark Siegel’s Sailor Twain are both ambitious historical graphic novels that return to early periods of New York history. Using strikingly different visual styles and narrative techniques, both create deeply haunting fables that, like much of…
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The City as Literary Field
Sujan Singh Park is a tiny neighborhood by Delhi standards—more of a large square than a full-fledged “colony,” as the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of South Delhi are called. But this one happens to be where the city’s linguistic, social, and architectural capitals meet. Madhu Jain, a chronicler of the Indian arts scene, describes Sujan Singh Park…
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Time to Occupy Silicon Valley? The New Tech Capitalists
Within 25 years, a life of “possibility,” including clean water, energy, education, information/communication, health, and freedom, will be attainable for all. So claims Abundance, a book that cites and has been glowingly reviewed by some of the most brilliant and successful science and technology entrepreneurs on the planet. And yet, in its rush to breathlessly…
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Turn, Turn …
Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, set in the near future, begins with an “invisible catastrophe” known as the slowing, a gradual deceleration of the earth’s rotation that extends days and nights, disrupts crop cycles, and even alters the effects of gravity. The novel’s title, however, refers to a far more distressing phenomenon: middle school, “the…
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The Mom Problem
For hard-core fans of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home—and we are legion—the publication of its follow-up, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, was a major event …
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The Anti-Revolutionary Science
Speaking to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City last October, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs placed himself squarely on their side, saying, “You are doing a magnificent job. This is how history is made. This is how this country is going to turn. Anything I can do, I’m going to…
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The Epistolary Terrorist
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, opens with an announcement that what follows is not a novel at all: Editor’s Note: With the exception of footnote annotations, the author’s acknowledgments, the editor’s afterward, and a supplemental article included with permission, all material herein has been reprinted verbatim from the confession…
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Dress-Up Games with Russian History
In 2002, the Kremlin-affiliated youth group Moving Together staged a public protest on Moscow’s Theater Square at which they threw the works of several prominent Russian postmodernist authors into an outsized papier-mâché toilet. In particular, they accused Vladimir Sorokin, who had achieved great acclaim in the preceding decade for his rather dense brand of conceptualist…
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Can Objects Be Evil?
Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed…
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Lost and Found: Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, Aimee Phan’s ambitious first novel, makes a striking contribution to the growing field of Vietnamese diasporic literature. As bearers of a traumatic history of colonization, war, and displacement, authors from the Vietnamese diaspora face the difficult task of negotiating a relationship with this past, and of determining the form and…
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Bolaño to Come
The English-speaking world has canonized Roberto Bolaño with astonishing rapidity. It’s not surprising that this consecration has begun to provoke skepticism among Spanish-speaking critics who concede Bolaño’s importance but detect a condescension to Latin American writing in the fervor of the Anglo acclaim. Some caution does seem warranted: when a writer earns comparisons to Coltrane,…
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Can’t Stop Screaming
Every line of Antigonick is printed in boldface handwriting, emphatic, as if something urgent and excessive has to be loudly said. The title and the format suggest that this is a translation of Sophocles’s Antigone with illustrations. From the start, however, contemporary elements intervene: stage directions are inserted within brackets, characters cite contemporary critics, and…
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The Persistence of Monarchy
“It is a mistake to think that the British monarchy persists only as an anachronistic institution, grafted awkwardly if beguilingly onto our modern celebrity-obsessed culture.”
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Binocular Vision, or Anne FrankDoesn’t Live Here Anymore
Do we know how to talk about Jewish writers when they are not talking about Anne Frank? Around the time that Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award this past spring, Nathan Englander published a new collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About…
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Comics Journalism, Comics Activism
It has been a good fifteen years now since our cultural gatekeepers collectively patted themselves on the back for having discovered that comics were “not just for kids anymore,” and in that time several remarkable achievements in the form have found their way into the critical spotlight. But for every Persepolis and Fun Home that…
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Shallow Abysses: Edith Wharton, Updated
The year 2012 marks both the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth and the 75th anniversary of her death. It’s a fact that would appeal to the authoress: her novels are populated by characters for whom each beginning contains the end of what might have been. None exemplifies this doubleness more than The Age of…
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Choking on Poverty: Inequality and Environmental Suffering
In the summer of 1978, a trucking company illegally dumped 31,000 gallons of used transformer oil along hundreds of miles of roads in Warren County, North Carolina. The location was no accident: This was the poorest county in the state, and the majority of its residents were black. Adding insult to injury, the state decided…
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How Did Susan Sontag Get to be So Famous?
In our time, how many American critics have been celebrities? How many have had the kind of name recognition that allows them to be casually mentioned in a mainstream Hollywood movie, or enough star power to be featured (along with their apartments) in People, the magazine which pretty much invented today’s celebrity culture? Not many.…
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The Politics of Sacred Life
Humanitarianism, according to Didier Fassin, is “a relatively recent invention” that has become “a potent force of our world” that is “global and yet uneven.” It has come, he asserts, to occupy “a key position in the contemporary moral order.” It is “mobilized in the practices of our societies, from the treatment of poverty, asylum, and…
