Marie NDiaye: 'Three Strong Women'

It is amazing sometimes the way we talk about the immigrant. What do they want? Why are they here? Are they ever going to leave again? Why do they do that thing in that way?

The titular Senegalese characters of Marie NDiaye’s Kirkus-starred Three Strong Women are in various versions of transit. Norah, born of a Senegalese father but raised in France, returns to Senegal for the first time in a very long time when her brother is arrested for murder. Fanta has recently left Senegal for France to follow her French husband, only to find herself unable to ...

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A Talk with Claudio Magris about ‘Blindly’

“Where are you, I do not see you.” I was standing on the corner waiting to be picked up by the great Claudio Magris. I was nervous. I scanned the street and finally saw his car, parked on the far end of the block. “Hang on a second,” and I quickly hoofed it down the street.

Magris, with his face made of weathered, eroded stone, and his growl of a voice, greeted me with a huge smile and a cheek kiss. “We will go to my home, you can look at my books. I have grapefruit juice.” I nervously assented ...

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A Closer Look at ‘A People’s History of London’

"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" This is the question the 14th century priest John Ball asked his flock as he looked around at the enormous economic inequality in London.

It was a class system that was determined entirely by birth—you were either born lucky and wealthy or not, and you did not have a chance at rising above your origins. Ball was something of a radical priest, in constant conflict with the church leaders, and when mere words were not enough, he moved to action, helping to lead the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 ...

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Inside ‘Privacy’ with Garret Keizer

You post online pictures of you and your friends, not exactly exhibiting a lot of restraint at a party. Next week, a prospective employer will see those photos. You send a friend a frustrated e-mail, joking that you’re going to blow up your building to quiet down a noisy neighbor. The NSA will see that e-mail. You buy a ticket to go home and visit your parents. Thanks to the latest in scanning technology the TSA will see you naked underneath that sensible blouse, all part of the screening process.

Our realm of privacy is slowly eroding, particularly if ...

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Inside ‘The Laurels of Lake Constance’

After the liberation of France, the hunt for collaborators began almost immediately. And the hunt was a bloody one.

Women who had slept with German soldiers were paraded naked, heads shaved, through towns to be spat upon and abused. Trials began, with harsh prison and death sentences meted out. (As passions cooled, many of these sentences would be reduced significantly.) And soon, like the German civilians who survived started to claim that they had hidden Jews in their attic, widespread boasting about participation in the resistance began. But, of course, had every claim been true, the Holocaust would not have ...

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‘Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz’

By the time I got around to reading David Wojnarowicz he was already dead. I picked up Close to the Knives as a teenager in the mid-’90s. He had died a few years earlier at the age of 37. Reading him was like touching a live wire, and whether or not he was still on the planet, it felt like there was a connection there.

Wojnarowicz wrote extensively about his decline in health and the virus that would eventually take him. The AIDS crisis loomed large in his work, and he confronted the failures of society, the church, the ...

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Getting Paid in Eddie Campbell’s ‘The Lovely Horrible Stuff’

As I was reading the new James Joyce biography, I started to wonder whatever happened to the patronage system?

Joyce had a knack for picking up patrons, for making it clear that he was a true genius, that he could not do something as gauche as work for his money, and his works of earthshaking brilliance would never find form if he and his family were not financially supported. As so here came a number of heiresses, willing to hand over large sums of money and not ask too many questions about where these important novels might be.

Read the ...

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Letters from Poland in '15 Journeys’

It is perhaps appropriate that throughout 15 Journeys: From Warsaw to London Jasia Reichardt keeps switching identities. Her life was first threatened, after all, in 1930s in Poland, because of a very particular identity she carried—she was Jewish. And so she changes names, changes homes, becomes Catholic at one point, and wanders around Poland and then to London, trying to make a life after the death of her parents.

Read the last Bookslut on Eva Illouz’s Why Love Hurts.

15 Journeys comes at you in waves. The book is structured as something of a mosaic, with family letters ...

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Love Deconstructed

I was about a hundred pages into Eva Illouz’s Why Love Hurts when I started e-mailing my friends, encouraging them to get copies. “It’s revolutionary,” I said.

For decades we, the unmarried and the unlucky in love, the serially monogamous and the unsatisfactorily married, have believed that this is our fault. And why wouldn’t we believe it? We had therapists telling us that we will never find love until we learn to love ourselves, we had self-help telling us we had to fix our daddy issues, we had TV shows telling us we weren’t skinny, alluring ...

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Gone, Baby, Gone: Gillian Flynn’s Awesome Whodunit

A man comes home one day to find his front door wide open, the house in disarray and his wife missing. He calls the police, but he’s been acting so, well, suspiciously.

The panic and concern seem a little rehearsed, and there are a few things he’s being less than upfront about. What the police think is a possibility becomes an obvious certainty once the media and the public get involved: this man killed his wife.

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Except, you know, well, maybe. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, she plays with the obvious ...

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From Siberia, a Tale of Everyday Survival

I am learning all sorts of tips on how to survive on the taiga from Rane Willerslev’s On the Run in Siberia. How to lay traps. How to fish frozen rivers. How to persuade the spirits to work in my favor. And yet I feel safe and secure in the knowledge that there is a 99.8 percent chance I will never have to use this information.

Read the last Bookslut on Alix Shulman's 'Ménage.'

On the Run is not simply a book of survival, even if it is the sexier part of the book. Willerslev came ...

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Three’s an Arty Crowd

We all know the refrain, “Money can’t buy everything.” No, but it certainly is nice to have it on hand, just in case.

But having too little or too much can be a corrosive force, and when money becomes the only commodity in a society’s interaction, the results are bound to be corrupt and warped. They are also, in the hands of Alix Shulman, bound to be hilarious.

Read the last Bookslut on Héctor Abad’s memoir Oblivion. 

In Ménage, Heather and Mack are members of what is now blithely referred to as the 1 percent ...

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Human Rights Play Central Role in ‘Oblivion’

In the opening pages of Héctor Abad’s memoir Oblivion we meet Abad’s father, Héctor Abad Gómez. He is a warm man, affectionate. Perhaps a little too so—when he hugs him in front of his friends it’s so very embarrassing.

Read the last Bookslut on the graphic novel 'Unterzakhn.'

A few chapters later we’re reintroduced to the man as husband and family man, and then a little later, as professor and doctor. As the pages turn, Héctor Jr. grows and so does his awareness of Héctor Sr., and the son can ...

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This Immigrant Life in ‘Unterzakhn’

Their paths should have been set. Two twin girls, two unterzakhn (Yiddish for “underthings”) are growing up in early 20^th-century New York on the Lower East Side, not quite in deep poverty but not exactly living privileged lives.

Read more new and notable fiction this May.

Their mother has decided to keep them out of school—why would someone who is merely going to become a wife and mother need to know how to read anyway?—and both are a little feral. But instead of living the lives set up for them by their time, gender and family ...

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‘Crusoe’ and the Single Lady

It is not often that we get a good spinster novel. Too frequently the figure is portrayed with great pity, or twisted and tormented by a lost love (a la Miss Havisham).

That does seem strange given the fact that after every significant war women have outnumbered men, and many have had to do without the loving (or not) attentions (or not) of a husband. After the Civil War, there was a tremendous imbalance of the sexes, and yet the only truly great document we have of the era is the diary of one such spinster, the Bostonian Alice James ...

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Fact and Fiction in ‘HHhH’

“Everyone finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic, or adding coherence to the narrative of a character whose real path probably included too many random ups and downs, insufficiently loaded with significance. It’s because of people like that, forever messing with historical truth just to sell their stories, that an old friend, familiar with all these fictional genres and therefore fatally accustomed to these processes of glib falsification, can say to me in innocent surprise: ‘Oh really, it’s not invented?’

“No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of ‘inventing’ Nazism?”

In ...

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Elias Khoury on Reissues, Music and the Middle East

Elias Khoury has been something of a secret figure in the literature scene. At least for an English-language audience.

Khoury had been active for decades in his native Lebanon as a writer and a translator, and working with literary journals. It took the 2006 publication of the English translation of his monumental work Gate of the Sun, an account of the displacement of the Palestinian people in a work of both hope and despair, humor and darkness, for him to be noticed.

Read the last Bookslut on Ellen Ullman.

Now that we do, however, we are lucky to receive a ...

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Ellen Ullman: Tech Bubbles, Bursts and the ’Net Now

Ellen Ullman’s By Blood is a big book—big in scope (the Holocaust is involved), big in ambition, big in its publicity press.

Read more new and notable fiction books this April. 

And yet it was her smaller books, languishing out of print for a while and now brought back thanks to the heft of By Blood, that I was interested in. In her memoir Close to the Machine and her novel The Bug, Ullman took a small corner of the literary universe and made it decidedly her own. She, a former programmer, wrote about technology and the world ...

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Faking It

“If [a fake] hangs on the wall long enough, it becomes real.” Those words, spoken by a distinguished art forger, are from the documentary F for Fake, but that only makes the words more potent.

Read more new and notable fiction this April.

This forger, Elmyr de Hory, and his journalist profiler, Clifford Irving, claim that there are fakes by Elmyr—fake Matisses, fake Modiglianis—all certified as genuine by panels of experts and now hanging in the finest museums in the world.

We all know the story very well. Van Gogh sold only one painting for money while he ...

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’80s Art: More Rebellious Than Remembered

When we think of art in the 1980s, it’s difficult not to be distracted by the garish and the gawdy. Art that was the equivalent of the women’s business attire at the time, all exaggerated shoulder pads and lacquered hair. It’s as if the only thing that decade managed to give us was Jeff Koons, all spectacle and surface, and endless episodes of Dynasty.

Read the last Bookslut on 'Proust Among the Nations.'

And yet. The decade opened with the revelation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a crafty and meditative work of feminist art that ...

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