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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China, Middlebrow to Highbrow
Fiction has more than one way of distancing itself from the real. In most cases this distance serves as a prelude to a future homecoming. The story, like some interstellar traveler, flings itself around the gravity well of a larger and more distant planetary object (the fictional) in order to assure the speed and accuracy…
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Why Does the Historical Novel Need to be Rescued?
Hilary Mantel has won two Booker Prizes for her re-imagination of the court of Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, the first two installments in a planned trilogy narrating one of the most famous and most represented episodes in English history. Reviews of both books inevitably begin with a…
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The Alchemy of Finance
For a few years in the late 1990s, the myth of a New Economy was everywhere. The old economy, with its pesky booms and busts, was a thing of the past, replaced by a new era of infinite prosperity powered by globalization, the Internet, and—most of all—the stock market. Lured on by the promise of…
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When Democracy Is In the Streets: An Appraisal of the Occupy Movement
In September 2011, a social worker I’ll call Roscoe Harris made his way to a plaza in lower Manhattan …
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Asian American Literature and the Price of Failure
Don Lee’s The Collective explores the politics of Asian American culture through the story of three characters: Joshua Yoon, Jessica Tsai, and Eric Cho. A Korean American from Mission Viejo, California, Eric serves as the narrator, but the book revolves around Joshua, a Korean orphan adopted by two liberal Jewish professors at Harvard. An egotistical…
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Building Stories: The Missing Manual
If there is a comics geek in your life (or if you happened recently to mention to family or friends a passing interest in “graphic novels”), this holiday season you are likely to find yourself the recipient of a beautiful but mystifying object: Building Stories. But don’t worry, we here at Public Books can help:…
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Revolution Amnesia
Philippine National Book Award–recipient Gina Apostol is a novelist with a penchant for unlikely heroes. Gun Dealers’ Daughter, her American debut, is no exception. The bulk of the novel offers the confession of Soledad Soliman, or “Sol,” a wealthy young woman turned communist rebel who had participated in a murder plot against an American counterinsurgency…
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Churches of Vinyl: Archive and Authenticity in the Pop Music Novel
The recent publication of yet another big novel centrally preoccupied with popular music—Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, one of whose key locations is an East Bay record store in 2004 specializing in used jazz, soul, and R&B vinyl records—invites consideration of what Rick Moody has recently observed is the surprisingly ubiquitous presence, in recent literary fiction,…
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Good Morning iPad: Technology in 21st-Century Picture Books
After teaching her class the “Star light, star bright” rhyme, my son’s preschool teacher invited each child to express a wish to be inscribed onto a paper star for them to decorate. Lousy with glitter, my son’s star read: “I wish I could play with electronics whenever I want.” From earliest toddlerhood, he had been…
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Doin’ the Stuff: Reason , Belief, Modernity
A few years ago, during fieldwork I was conducting on an evangelically minded Christian charity in England, one of the managers told me about a peculiar issue the charity sometimes faced when it came to hiring new staff: job applicants felt emboldened to enlist the Heavenly Father as a reference. “God told me I was…
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The American Dream Outsourced: India and the Genre of Growth
For much of the twentieth century, the conjugation of “India” and “economic growth” invoked either despair or derision. The phrase “Hindu rate of growth”—coined by economist Raj Krishna to distinguish India’s nominal 3.5 percent average rate of growth between 1950 and the 1980s from that of the dynamic “tiger” economies, South Korea and Taiwan—captured both…
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Somewhere, Johnson
Dana Johnson, author of the beautifully written Elsewhere, California, wants so much for you to know her novel is about place, that she puts one of the nation’s most famous states in its title. This is also a novel about color: the color of skin, water, sky, and Dodgers’ hats, the color of grass and…
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Everything Old Is New Again
In the past few years it’s gotten so you can’t go to the movies without finding onscreen a burly guy dressed as Ernest Hemingway, cavorting with women wearing shingled hair and calf-length skirts. Everywhere filmgoers turn, flappers and gangsters and accent coaches abound. Culturally, we’re experiencing an intense fetish for the 1920s and ’30s that…
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Islamic Desire
An Arab Melancholia seems tailor-made for the contemporary cultural wars between liberal humanists and Islamic fundamentalists. “Abdellah Taïa,” the book’s blurb declares, “is the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco”—not only a Moroccan gay writer but the first one to write autobiographically about his own gay life and to be published in Morocco…
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Spain’s Unending War
The best seller El lector de Julio Verne (The Reader of Jules Verne) by Spanish author Almudena Grandes is the second novel in a planned series of six, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes of an Unending War), a large-scale narrative project that will aim to convey the devastating trajectory of the first twenty-five years…
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Boomer Do-Over: Stephen King’s “11/22/63”
Where were you when JFK was assassinated? This is the first of eleven discussion questions appended to the new paperback edition of 11/22/63, Stephen King’s time-travel novel. The questions precede other Book Club Kit features designed to help groups of readers “travel back” to the period: a Q & A with the author, a playlist…
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Edward St. Aubyn and the Depressive Third Person
Few recent novelists offer as many misguided reasons for being liked or disliked than Edward St. Aubyn, whose five Patrick Melrose novels—Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother’s Milk (2006), and At Last (2011, published in the United States in early 2012)—have been the occasion of some glowing press. Sensationalism is the…
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Scientific Semitism: Exceptional or Exemplary?
For at least 1,500 years, the Jewish people have defined themselves through genealogical practices: according to Jewish law, a person is Jewish simply because he or she is born of a Jewish mother. If there is one belief that defines Judaism and the Jewish people, it is belief in the existence of Jewish collectivity, genealogically…
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A Godlike Science
Is there something missing from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? One would think that an author’s say over her work’s substance would be final. Yet the novel’s prolific adaptations seem obsessed with filling in the gory details that Shelley avoids. The latest such homage, Frankenstein, by Dave Morris and inkle Studios, reworks Shelley’s text as an interactive…
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Native Noir
The Round House is, arguably, the first foray into genre fiction for celebrated Native American novelist Louise Erdrich, and the result is a gripping whodunit. The crime: the brutal rape and attempted murder of an Ojibwe woman, Geraldine Coutts, on a …
