Narrative, a great online literary magazine, has a new issue out featuring a new story by Rick Bass and a classic by Frank Conroy. You can sign up for a free “subscription” to get access to the above stories as well as everything in their archives.
New Narrative
Let’s hope the publishing industry doesn’t get any ideas
Soon after learning that books are, quite literally, cool, we now find that reading may become a more popular pastime in Thailand, but not because of a sudden interest in all things literary.Bomb worries help book sales: After New Years Eve bomb blasts put Bangkok on edge, “Thailand’s book market looks likely to grow by 10% this year, partly thanks to the new-found preference of many to stay at home rather than going out.”Reading: a good way to pass the time in the bomb shelter.
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From the Newsstand: Michael Lewis Goes to Iceland
Michael Lewis turns in yet another tremendous piece in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This one is about the catastrophic financial collapse in Iceland:Walking into the P.M.’s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single policeman sitting behind a reception desk, feet up on the table, reading a newspaper. He glances up, bored. “I’m here to see the prime minister,” I say for the first time in my life. He’s unimpressed. Anyone here can see the prime minister. Half a dozen people will tell me that one of the reasons Icelanders thought they would be taken seriously as global financiers is that all Icelanders feel important. One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like. For those following along at home, we’ve also noted Lewis’ two takes on the Wall Street collapse and his more recent piece on the NBA.
On Race, Class and the Hollywood ‘Whiteout’
What we need are more serious movies with multiracial characters/casts that aren't SCARE QUOTES MOVIES ABOUT RACE END SCARE QUOTES. We need more movies that simultaneously are and aren't about race: movies that are dramas and comedies, about love, death, the usual human plots—and also happen to be about race.
From the Newsstand: Eisenberg on Nádas
As others have noted, the current issue of The New York Review of Books features a long Deborah Eisenberg essay on the Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas (now available online courtesy of Powell’s Bookstore). I’ve been interested in Nádas for some time (though the sheer size of A Book of Memories requires putting it off until next year) and in Eisenberg for longer, and so it may come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I found her essay completely beguiling.Unlike certain other NYRB contributors – one can barely turn around these days without running into John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates, you know, appreciating this or reconsidering that – Eisenberg’s critical corpus has so far been small. Possibly nonexistent. You won’t find her penning introductions and encomiums and toasts; they’d probably run to 15,000 words and take her a year to write. All I knew of her literary taste, prior to reading “The Genius of Peter Nádas,” was that it overlapped with mine (Robert Walser, Humberto Constantini).As it turns out, Eisenberg brings to nonfiction the same philosophical and perceptual rigor, the same psychological acuity, and the same metaphorical daring that animate her stories. “After finishing [A Book of Memories], I, for one, felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain,” she writes, before going on to cover totalitarianism, war, literary style, and the situation of the American writer. It is almost enough to make one wish for more Eisenberg essays. Alas, time being finite, that might deprive us of Eisenberg fiction.
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New York Magazine Kicks Playa-tastic Game at World of Letters; World of Letters Says, “Uh…Thanks”; Good Time Had By All
The current issue of New York Magazine offers a typically glib handicapping of this summer’s debut novels and hot young fabulists, as well as surveys of overlooked books and of writers likely to stand the test of time. I’m least sympathetic to this American Idol style of journalism when it covers well-trod territory; New York’s a speculative “future canon” offers few surprises (Gary Lutz and Helena Maria Viramontes among them). But the lengthy “underrated” list does offer readers an introduction to new writers… as do the excerpts from works in progress by “tomorrow’s literary stars” (including my friend Maaza Mengiste.)It’s refreshing to read fiction in New York; perhaps they should do this more often. Anyway, if the endless brouhaha surrounding the Times’ attention-grabbing “Best Books of the Last 25 Years” failed to tire you out, click on over to New York and check out the offerings.
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A New Quarterly Conversation
A new issue of the excellent online literary review, The Quarterly Conversation has been posted. There are plenty of goodies on offer, but perhaps the most intriguing is a piece by François Monti about Zone, a French novel by Mathias Énard that has certain literary corners of Europe buzzing. It’s got quite a hook:Zone, as has been much noted, is a 517-page sentence, and its rhythm is one that draws readers inevitably toward the end, much faster than you would have thought. It’s difficult to stop for a breather, to try and reflect on what’s being read. Somehow, form and content stymie a consideration of the meaning of the narration and the way it works. I thought I liked it perhaps more than I really did.The book will be published in English by Open Letter in summer 2010.
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