Rose on ‘Proust Among the Nations’

It might seem like the long way around to talk about the Israel-Palestinian conflict through the filter of Marcel Proust, and yet Jacqueline Rose makes it seem like the only sensible way to do it.

Read Richard Zacks' history of New York City's era of vice.

Her wide-ranging book opens with the influence that the Dreyfus Affair had on Proust, France and then the Zionist movement, but also keeps the birth of psychoanalysis, Samuel Beckett, the Holocaust, France’s banning of the burka and modern-day Israel in her sharp focus as well.

Rose is neither Zionist nor an anti-Zionist ...

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The Dark and Light in 'Amazing'

“Lying down among the daffodils I am composed / but not the daffodils because I crushed them! Not / as an act in itself It was auxiliary...”

The poems in Heather Christle’s new collection What is Amazing look at the world with a bit of childlike glee (“When I return as a giraffe” she writes in the same poem). And like children, the poems delight in destruction as much as they do in creation. The world ends in What is Amazing, but it ends with an excited exclamation mark.

Read the last Bookslut about dance bars in Bombay in Sonia Faleiro ...

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Sex Work and Dance Bars in Bombay

With Beautiful Thing, journalist and novelist Sonia Faleiro gives readers a dark peek into the world of Bombay dance bars. Through the eyes of the young Leela, an amazingly resilient and warm 19-year-old dancer, we meet an array of young women who work as dancers and prostitutes in the red light district. They are abused, they are destitute, but they are wickedly funny and optimistic, discussing their hopes for their futures in the same breath as they describe the horrors of the present.

Read Bookslut on 'Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the ...

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The New Gay

“Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots is an emergency intervention,” writes Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in the introduction to the new anthology. The collection of diverse and unruly writing, subtitled Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was put together in response to what Sycamore and other writers saw as a flattening of a vibrant gay culture, a culture more obsessed in participating in consumer culture with “Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers” than celebrating its schism from the outside world.

Read the last Bookslut on 'Portrait of the Mother.'

Of course, that is the way most ...

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'Portrait of the Mother' is Slight Yet Powerful

It is a tiny slip of a book, unassuming in both size and color. And yet it might as well be covered in razor blades for the way it slices into you and leaves you on the floor, weepy and devastated.

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The young woman of the title, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, is a German...“woman” is pushing it. She’s barely 21, but heavily pregnant, married and waiting for her husband to come back from war. It is 1943, and she has been displaced in Rome. She came down to ...

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The Great Collapse

When history is told, it is the stories of the bold and the victorious that we want to hear about. Enemies and invaders being thwarted, moments of struggle and adversity overcome, the rise of the nation state into a place of glory.

Read the last Bookslut on 'The Green Sofa.'

And yet that discards so many rich tales of the nations and peoples who did not make it. Take Alt-Clud, or the Kingdom of the Rock. Situated on the River Clyde in what is now the United Kingdom, all that remains of a civilization from the time of the Vikings ...

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From the War Years, a Charmer in ‘The Green Sofa’

Isn’t it strange how we are able to look back at those brief decades between World War I and World War II and be romantic about it all? Like Woody Allen’s rosy Midnight in Paris, we remember the glamour, the creativity, the writing and the painting, the decadence and the hedonism at the time, particularly in cities like Paris and Berlin. It was the time of Coco Chanel and Ernest Hemingway, of Otto Dix and the cabaret.

Read about new and notable fiction in February.

From this distance, it is easy to miss the devastation that inspired that ...

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A Look into the Odd and the Unknown

Reading Melissa Pritchard’s short-story collection The Odditorium is a bit like peering into a Wunderkammer, one of those magical cabinets where the rich and adventurous used to display their treasures. The beautiful, the grotesque. The odd, the charming. The bits of bone relics of saints next to a beautiful shell, or the horn from an animal hunted and killed.

Read the last Bookslut on international adoption in 'Finding Fernanda.'

Pritchard too uses odd juxtapositions and treasures dug up from history to display in her stories. She even has bits of saints as well, as St. Dymphna, the patroness of ...

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The Horrors of International Adoption in ‘Finding Fernanda’

A woman slowly comes to after being put under by her obstetrician. She wasn’t due for several more weeks, and yet she wakes up to find her massive belly flat, the child removed and herself in stitches. One of her daughters has already been abducted, and now no one will tell her where her newborn baby might be.

Read new and notable nonfiction this January.

It should be fiction. It almost wouldn’t even make good fiction, as it’s almost too melodramatically horrible to be believable. And yet in the world of international adoption, it’s horrifyingly less ...

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The ‘Forgotten Land’ of East Prussia

At the end of World War II, it seemed important to remove Prussia from the larger German nation. Prussia had for some time had the reputation of fueling Germany’s bloodthirstiness, from its aristocratic Junkers to its slightly scary looking soldiers.

Read the last Bookslut on Barbara Almond's take on motherhood in 'The Monster Within.'

The land was divided up between the Soviet Union and Poland, and thousands of Germans, some of whom had roots going back centuries and others who were settled during the rise of the Third Reich, found themselves displaced and homeless.

But East Prussia had ...

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Monsters in Motherhood

You would think there is nothing left to say about motherhood. We have hundreds, thousands, of mommy blogs. We have motherhood memoirs, scientific studies about perfect child rearing, countless magazine articles explaining that we’re all doing it wrong. Surely every angle has been covered, right?

Read about zombies and other crazy happenings in 'After the Apocalypse.'

Barbara Almond makes the argument in The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood that actually we have a very difficult time discussing maternal ambivalence. Most, if not all, women have deeply conflicted emotions and fears about bearing and raising children, and yet ...

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Zombies and Other Problems in 'After the Apocalypse'

So the apocalypse happened. An avian disease crossed over to humans due to unsanitary conditions in our factory farms. Or a computer was built so sophisticated and powerful it accidentally became sentient. Or the zombies showed up. Whatever it was, civilization as we know it has ceased to exist. And yet here we are, some of us, and life is less like The Hunger Games and more like any other regular day, with rent to pay and a family to take care of, except with less access to clean water. And now there are zombies.

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These Infantile Times

When Valentina Hasan auditioned for the reality show Bulgarian Idol, the stars were aligned for instant fame, just not in the way she was hoping. Hasan’s translation of the power ballad “Without You,” with its famous line, “I can’t live, if living is without you,” became “Ken Lee, tulibu dibu douchoo,” and her big-hearted attempt at selling her performance made her a YouTube sensation.

Read the last Bookslut on 'In Red.'

Hasan also, as told by Dubravka Ugresic in her essay “Post-Communist Practice” from her new collection Karaoke Culture, became the accidental center of a nationalist fight in ...

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‘In Red’ Explores a Small Polish Town

In the small Polish town of Stitchings, the rules of the outer world do not apply. After a girl’s heart has stopped, the family starts preparing for her funeral. Only she won’t lie down and die, insisting she’s fine and why won’t they let her go dancing? Her beloved, unwilling to marry a slightly dead girl, leaves her for another. Buildings come and go, vanishing without a trace. Bullets fly around the world for years, until someone walks into their path at the wrong hour. A girl at her sewing accidentally marks soldiers for death with ...

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Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson Revealed in 'Dangerous Ambition'

I was struck by Susan Hertog’s statement in her dual biography, Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power, that both West and Thompson had “failed as women.” They were successes as people, that is certain. West is the author of one of the world’s greatest books of travel writing, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and Thompson was a journalist who influenced foreign policy and interviewed Adolf Hitler. But did they fail as women?

Read the last Bookslut on Joan Aiken.

Both had a series of failed relationships and marriages, it ...

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Joan Aiken: ‘The Monkey’s Wedding’ and Other Delights

It’s always the children’s book writers that you have to watch out for. Joan Aiken was known primarily for her picture books, her children’s poetry and her alternate history books for young adults called the Wolves Chronicles. It was her writing for children that made her famous.

Read the last Bookslut on 'Sybil Exposed.'

But she also had a habit of writing for adults, sneaky and sinister stories with fantastical elements and a dark edge. They are written with a whimsical, lighthearted style suitable for someone who spends their time in the company of kids, but once ...

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The Mesmerizing Story of ‘Sybil Exposed’

There was a time, only a few decades ago, when multiple personality disorder was sweeping the nation. I mean to use the language of a fad, of a suddenly exciting rock band. After the release of Sybil the book by Flora Schreiber and Sybil the mini-series starring Sally Field, hundreds of thousands of diagnoses were handed out. Gloria Steinem was calling the disorder a “gift” to women. Multiples were guests on daytime talk shows, and they were writing books about the experiences, and celebrities like Roseanne Barr were coming forward with their own struggles with the disorder.

Read the last ...

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The Allure of Alice James

The circumstances of Alice James’ life would have made almost anyone want to stay in bed. Born of a patriarchal father who believed women were saintly creatures incapable of real work, sister to two bona fide geniuses—the philosopher William James and the novelist Henry James—she could not possibly compete with, and of a post-war era when the women far outnumbered the men guaranteeing a surplus of spinsters...the odds seemed stacked against Alice James.

Read the last Bookslut about Stasiland.

And so she did. Stay in bed, I mean. She used illness as an escape and as a ...

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Behind the Wall in ‘Stasiland’

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is a document of a city in flux. After the fall of the wall, the East and West found itself intermingling, sometimes unwillingly, in a city that had to transform itself structurally and demographically very quickly. Australian journalist Anna Funder found herself drawn to these places of tension.

Read other new and notable nonfiction titles new for October.

In Stasiland we meet a former propagandist for the East, who told its populace that everything was fine even as the economy was collapsing. We meet a woman searching for information about her boyfriend who ...

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The Allure of the Shopgirl

Meet Ruth. She’s a little lost, a little feeble, a little unsteady on her feet. She is what Kate Zambreno, her creator, calls a Green Girl, a girl suffering through her own becoming. She is an American lost in London, working at a department store she bitterly calls Horrids, trying to force a perfume called Desire on American tourists.

Read the last Bookslut on Mr. Fox.

You might not expect such a girl to keep the company of Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Cornell and John Keats, but in Zambreno’s world she does. Writers and filmmakers and philosophers ...

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