The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.
An eclectic collection about topics related to our current position in the Anthropocene.
In a wide-ranging series of essays, Wilk, author of the acclaimed novel Oval, examines a variety of genre-bending creative works. She derives her title from a Margaret Atwood story about how a missing girl in a liminal person-plant transition becomes part of the landscape. Wilk begins with “what it means to be a person in an age of drastic ecosystem decline—of planetary extinction.” A sense of urgency pervaded what she calls the early systems novels of DeLillo, Coover, Pynchon, and Gaddis, which manipulated or upended genre conventions. Drawing on works by H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Powers, among others, Wilk explores what constitutes weirdness, eeriness, and ecosystems in fiction. She seeks to understand death as a “kind of life through landscape,” including the effects of a toxic environment on people and art as employed in Jenny Hval’s novel Paradise Rot and Karen Russell’s short story “The Bad Graft,” which follows “an unwanted, unexpected, erotic interspecies incursion.” The “impossible terrain” of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Wilk notes, is a good example of “narratives reflecting the transformations of the drastically changing planet.” Pandemic and apocalyptic stories “offer a lot for comprehending our current situation,” while dystopian landscapes “rendered in familiar fashions” can still be titillating or terrifying. Science fiction, Wilk contends, has found its own utopian landscapes in steampunk, solarpunk, cyberpunk, and films like Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. In the latter part of the book, the author verges off into some robust issues about empathy and virtual reality as a “trauma machine” as well as her own intriguing participation in the improvisational theater of a vampire larp (live action role-playing). Wilk concludes with autobiographical reflections on Oval, a larp based on it, and her writing methods.
The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59376-715-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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