Things Got Weird: On the Early ‘90s Crack-Up
Ganz vividly renders the early 1990s’ shouty yet blankly confused alienations along with the endlessly gassy and vituperative “whither America?” debates.
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Prestige Comics: On the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection
The idea that a citadel of bookishness has fallen to this siege of adolescent fantasia could easily take on outsize importance.
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Noah Van Sciver Bids Farewell to Fante Bukowski
Fante Bukowski doesn’t have an interest in learning the craft. He has an interest in being a writer and just having that title. He has an interest in being an alcoholic. He thinks that seems really cool. He would never go to a writing workshop or anything like that.
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Should We Still Read Norman Mailer?
Sharp-eyed yet unreliable, inquisitive but quilted in self-regard, Mailer covered the 1960s with an insightful fatuousness that irritates and rewards as much now as it probably did then.
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Speculative Fiction and Survival in Iraq
Unlike almost every other book you will find out there about Iraq right now, this ambitious new short story collection has little to say directly about all the nation’s recent wars.
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The Creative Chrysalis: On Neal Stephenson’s ‘Seveneves’
A big heaping slab of idea-packed, throwback, hard sci-fi, Stephenson’s latest brick of a book is thought-provoking but staid; a sad turn for one of the sharpest, most irreverent minds in a genre still reinventing itself.
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To Hell with All that Guilty Love: On Steve Almond’s ‘Against Football’
Wrapping up issues of corporate welfare, media sycophancy, sanctioned brutality, and beating them with an angry stick, Almond’s screed is less an assault on football than the organization that aids and abets its worst behavior.
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Free to Be Depressed and Alone: On George Packer’s The Unwinding
Occasionally, societies fall apart. These are the voices of those caught in the current American vortex of disconnection and angst.
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Those Grand, Wicked Futures: The Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Nine Classics Novels of the 1950s
From Bester to Heinlein, Sturgeon to Matheson, this collection digs deep into the decade’s traumas and comes up with visionary gold.
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Worlds Beyond Your Ken: A Guide to the Nebula Awards
The six novels nominated for this year’s Nebula Awards run from clanking steampunk fantasy from a first-timer Genevieve Valentine to heady and otherworldly linguistic theorizing courtesy of China Miéville—wonders await.
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When Film Mattered: Pauline Kael’s The Age of Movies
Pauline Kael argued about the movies as though her life depended on it. But that’s not what makes this an essential read for all the uninitiated, nor is it her depth of knowledge, her wit, or her ability to turn a line; it’s that she was so often right.
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