Keeping Up Appearances

“We need to talk about our children.”

 This line in Herman Koch's The Dinner comes after the cocktail and the appetizer, before the arrival of the main course. Before these words are spoken, the reader would be forgiven for thinking they were reading a satire of foodie culture, of the people who think by paying 28 euro for a locally sourced, grass fed, artisanally aged cheese they are helping to save the world, of spending several minutes photographing your food to document your meal while it slowly grows cold. But with those words, The Dinner takes a sinister turn ...

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The Bitter Life of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet

In Shirley Jackson's world, your house was either your refuge or your ruin. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, two girls close themselves off from sinister villagers in their fortress-like abode, refusing to abandon it even when their neighbors set it on fire. In The Haunting of Hill House, some malicious spirit in the eponymous structure calls to the mousy little Eleanor, dooming her to remain on its grounds forever. In The Sundial, a family holes up in their home to wait out some unknown calamity–armageddon? a plague? an asteroid?–believing they will be safe as ...

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The Sins of the Father (and the Dictator)

In the generation after World War II, German writers like Heinrich Böll and artists like Anselm Kiefer felt compelled to investigate the sins of their fathers. And their works burn with a ferocity earned from their task. They needed to know, was it something about the German nature that laid waste to an entire continent? Was it perhaps something that existed inside them as well? Or was it part of a grand historical tradition, the slash-and-burn, annihilating energy that has caused so many wars and atrocities before, something that might be inherent in everyone?

It’s part of a ...

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Re-Learning the Medieval Ages

There are few periods of time as misunderstood as the Medieval age. Previously labeled the “Dark Ages,” it was assumed that the centuries between the Roman era and the Renaissance were bloody, illiterate times, superstitious and miserable.

The scholarship on the Medieval ages has made considerable advances in understanding this era, revealing instead a book-worshipping culture, a period of great art and relative stability. The assumptions have been slow to dissolve, however, as a small controversy erupted in the academic community when the National Book Award and Pulitzer was awarded to Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, a book that relies ...

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'The Heart Broke In': A Novel to Ponder but also Delight In

It happens like clockwork now, the public debate between an atheist and a person of faith. “Does God Exist? Does It Matter?” The rise of atheism has led mostly to disappointing books, polemics about the irrationality of believing in an invisible power, arguments driven to prove that religion is actually a destructive force, the root cause of war and injustice and cruelty.

But on the very small shelf of books about atheism, morality and religion, we can now proudly add James Meek’s wonderful novel The Heart Broke In. It’s a book of philosophical inquiry and ideas, set within ...

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'Prosperous Friends': An Addictive but Cold Read

There is much to admire about Christine Schutt's Prosperous Friends, but not a whole lot to love. It's a cold book, and bone thin. It's sparse in the way that a winter tree is sparse--unfruitful and hard, all excess life discarded to survive the conditions. Once I started to read it, I became addicted to it. But I also wanted to take it into a field to bury it and leave it far away from me.

Prosperous Friends is the story of two marriages. Ned and Isabel are young, attractive, and full of promise. "Full of promise ...

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Ambition Poisons the Pursuit of Art in 'Two-Part Inventions'

When Joyce Hatto, the famous classical pianist, died in 2006 she was a respected and beloved figure. The obituaries were tender and loving. But then the suspicions and the accusations started to leak out, and only a few months after her death she was being portrayed as quite a different figure. Her recordings, the beautiful playing that earned her a devoted audience, were, in a sense, plagiarized. Those were other people playing the piano, dubbed in and stapled over the rougher genuine Hatto sections. It was a shocking scandal.

In Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new novel Two-Part Inventions, classical pianist ...

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Watch Out for the Thin Places

So let's just say, for example, that you're driving along and all of a sudden there are these blinding lights in the sky. And they're not moving like any aircraft that you know of. And once they disappear into the night sky, just as quickly as they appeared, you look around and notice you're about 100 miles off course, and it's now 11pm, when you know for a fact that just a few minutes ago you had looked at the clock and it had been 9. Can you accept the ambiguity and the realization that ...

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Mikhail Shishkin’s 'Maidenhair': Sifting the Desperate Lies from the Truth

It is someone’s job to listen to the atrocities suffered and witnessed by refugees and decide whether or not that person is lying. Whether that person will be granted amnesty, or whether that person will be sent back into the landscape they had just escaped. In Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair, this is Peter’s job. He took over after the woman who held the job before him became too credulous, believing every horrible story of torture, rape, and murder, lying awake at night unable to stop picturing them all, and granting asylum to everyone.

So now Peter must listen ...

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The Russian Revolution, Told From the Other Side

It’s a difficult time to drum up sympathy for the ultra rich. With all the talk about 1%ers and 99%ers (let's not forget the 47%ers) and the injustice and inequality of our current economic system, Douglas Smith's Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy might seem a little out of step with the contemporary dialogue. Then again, perhaps his reminder about how poisonous the politics of revenge can become is particularly prescient.

Smith writes a history of the Russian Revolution from the other side, from the nobility and the landowners and the ...

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Elizabeth Bowen, One Tough Old Bird

Occasionally, the stars align and you are presented with the exact book you were in that moment needing. Or, as Arthur Koestler put it, “I have always believed that in the administration of Divine Providence there is a special department entirely concerned with seeing that the right book comes into the hands of a reader at the right moment."

I started reading Elizabeth Bowen on the train from Dublin to Cork, my first return trip in seven years to a city where I had once lived. I don't remember what made me pack – or even buy – The Death of ...

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Peter Doggett on David Bowie, 'The Man Who Sold the World'

When one looks back at the ‘60s and ‘70s, it’s hard to separate out the politics, the social movements and the tumult of the time from the music: Joplin, the Beatles, the Stones, Iggy Pop, and, of course, David Bowie. He was, and is, of the ‘70s, his various personae acting as the personification of the era in all its fragmented glory.

So when Peter Doggett went about writing a book about David Bowie, he chose to leave him in his context. He writes exclusively about the Bowie of the ‘70s—up until and including Scary Monsters—and as ...

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A Conversation With Mark Z. Danielewski

It’s a disturbing little tale, but isn’t that what we’ve come to expect from Mark Z. Danielewski? We’ve also come to expect visual trickery, this being the man who colored every instance of the word “house” blue in House of Leaves and required you to spin the book in your hands to follow the text as it climbed the sides and spiralled inward.

His latest story is no less intense, no less strange, no less visually captivating. The Fifty Year Sword is a ghost story of sorts, told in one night in East Texas. A stranger ...

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Michael Taussig Considers the Price of Beauty

I have been following the facial structure of a particular celebrity. There is no good reason for this—a series of unfortunate choices made on Google brought me to a forum where this celebrity’s extensive plastic surgery was being discussed. There were pictures, side by side comparisons, arguments over whether age or a knife had been the cause of particular changes. I was fascinated, and I was a little disgusted with myself that I was suddenly forming opinions and having feelings about what a famous woman decided to do with her face.

In Michael Taussig’s latest work, Beauty ...

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A Conversation with Poet Hoa Nguyen

The first time I met Hoa Nguyen, I had shown up on her doorstep nine years ago to interview her and her husband Dale Smith about Skanky Possum, an Austin, Texas poetry journal they ran together. I thought she did marvelous work back then, and I think she does marvelous work now.

Her new collection As Long As Trees Last echoes something Smith had said all those years ago: “It is kind of psychotic to write poetry.” It’s not only the usual griping about diminished audiences or insular poetry culture, it’s about responding to the collapsing economy, the ...

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Tonino Benacquista on Writing Women in 'The Thursday Night Men'

I admit to being a little trepidatious about Tonino Benacquista’s novel The Thursday Night Men. I had just stopped reading a book halfway through where every female character was reduced to her sexual assets; if a woman was not supposed to be sexy, she was described as fat, hideous, monstrous, like an ogre. So a book about men talking about their women problems? Populated by a long string of prostitutes? It could have gone bad. Maxim magazine bad. Spur Posse bad.

But Benacquista is the man responsible for the beautiful movie The Beat That My Heart Skipped as well ...

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Bookslut Shines Light on Fall's Underappreciated Titles

It happens every fall. The fall is when the big books come out—your established, award-winning, glowingly reviewed Major Writers. And the next few months seem particularly choked with them. Salman Rushdie, JK Rowling, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Michael Chabon, the list continues. The unintentional consequence is that if you are a less prominent writer, not yet a Pulitzer Prize winner or a zeitgeist defining bestseller, it can be a struggle to get a little attention.

So here are four books that have either been overlooked or that are in danger of being under-read, as everyone struggles to get through ...

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Robie H. Harris on Life on the Banned Books List

Every year the American Library Association issues a list of challenged books—books that have been removed from library shelves, books that have sparked controversies in communities, books that someone feels are obscene, vulgar, pornographic or otherwise inappropriate. And year after year, Robie H. Harris’s book It’s Perfectly Normal can be found on that list.

In 1996, it was challenged in Washington because the “book is an act of encouragement for children to begin desiring sexual gratification... and is a clear example of child pornography." In 2002 in Texas, it was decided the book tried "to minimize or ...

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Sister Spit: Writings, Rants & Reminiscence from the Road

I’d owned my paperback copy of The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America for about a year when I found out Michelle Tea was coming to my city for a reading with the Sister Spit tour. Only a year and yet the thing was falling apart. I had read it repeatedly, I had read it out loud to my sister in the car, I had lent it out only to start asking for it back nervously after a week or so. I probably arrived at the reading 30 minutes early, anxious that I get a ...

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Mean Girls: Megan Abbott's 'Dare Me'

“ ‘You wait your whole life for something to happen,’ [Beth]’s saying, her face virtuous, princess-like, under the rimy fluorescents. ‘Then, suddenly, it’s all the terrors of the earth all at once. Is that how it feels to you, Addy?’ ”

When you’re a teenage girl, just about anything can feel like the terrors of the earth, and in Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, her band of cheerleaders face mysterious deaths, stubborn baby fat, statutory rape, squad excommunication, a bloodless coup, blackmail and a talent scout. To them, it all registers on the same level: terrifying. It all inspires ...

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