John Domini reviews Joseph McElroy’s Cannonball in the pages of Bookforum. In our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview, our own Garth Risk Hallberg wrote that, “this, his first novel in many a moon, concerns the Iraq War, among other things, and it’s hard to think of an author more suited to reimagining the subject.”
On McElroy’s Cannonball
Mark Haddon Takes to the Stage
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time author Mark Haddon will see his debut effort as a playwright hit the stage next month. The Independent tries to get the scoop. “So now we have this game of chess, in which you ask me what my new play is about, and I choose not to tell you what it’s about.”
From the Mixed Up Files of DFW
Newsweek takes an “infinitely fascinating quest” through David Foster Wallace’s just-released archive at University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center.
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Whoopee Cushion
“Let the buppie and the arts section go to hell: Swiss Army Man is a film by which critics ought to judge ourselves. We have seen this movie before, in our dreams, when we were children. Its extraordinary contact with our oldest forms of storytelling seems to have rendered it an unintelligible novelty, but if we can’t see how gracefully everything in it matters to everything else in it — plot to character development to dialogue to music to art direction to setting to acting to cinematography — then there’s something wrong with us.” Daniel Radcliffe stars as a semi-animate, gas-filled corpse with amnesia in Swiss Army Man — a movie about farts. But what else is it about?
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Edwidge Danticat on Earthquake in Haiti
Video of Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat talking about the earthquake in Haiti at Democracy Now.
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