As Prose implores: “Drop everything. Start reading. Now.”
An unabashed fan of reading recommends some of her favorite books.
The prolific literary critic, essayist, and novelist Prose (Mister Monkey, 2017, etc.) follows up Reading Like a Writer (2006) with an eclectic collection of previously published pieces that continue her clarion call for how books can “transport and entertain and teach us.” She sets the stage for the essays with “Ten Things that Art Can Do,” enthusiastically arguing that art is essential to life. She deftly mixes biography and critical analysis to demonstrate how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein challenges us “to ponder the profound issues raised by the monster and by the very fact of his existence.” Prose’s love of and fascination with Great Expectations, Cousin Bette, Middlemarch, Little Women, and New Grub Street, “so engrossing, so entertaining, so well made,” and Mansfield Park, “arguably the greatest of Austen’s novels,” will have readers anxious to revisit these classics. As a fine practitioner of the art of the short story, Prose feels a kind of “messianic zeal…to make sure that [Mavis] Gallant’s work continues to be read, admired—and loved.” Poet Mark Strand’s “remarkable” collection Mr. and Mrs. Baby offers us distant echoes of “the dark comedy of Kafka and Beckett, the lyrical imagination of Calvino and Schulz.” Prose also praises the work of Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bowles, Alice Munro, and Charles Baxter. She loves how Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, about refugees, can “alchemize the raw material of catastrophe into art.” Nonfiction is represented here too, as in Gitta Sereny’s “so controversial, so profoundly threatening” Cries Unheard, about an 11-year-old killer, or Diane Arbus’ Revelations, where the photographer “employed the grotesque as a staging ground in her quest for the transcendent.” My Struggle, the six-volume autobiographical work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, is “dense, complex, and brilliant.” Others discussed include Jennifer Egan, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edward St. Aubyn as well as Roberto Bolaño's 2666—"literary genius."
As Prose implores: “Drop everything. Start reading. Now.”Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-239786-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music.
An Ohio-based poet, columnist, and music critic takes the pulse of the nation while absorbing some of today’s most eclectic beats.
At first glance, discovering deep meaning in the performance of top-40 songstress Carly Rae Jepsen might seem like a tough assignment. However, Abdurraqib (The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, 2016) does more than just manage it; he dives in fully, uncovering aspects of love and adoration that are as illuminating and earnest as they are powerful and profound. If he can do that with Jepsen's pop, imagine what the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Prince, or Nina Simone might stir in him. But as iconic as those artists may be, the subjects found in these essays often serve to invoke deeper forays into the worlds surrounding the artists as much as the artists themselves. Although the author is interested in the success and appeal of The Weeknd or Chance the Rapper, he is also equally—if not more—intrigued with the sociopolitical and existential issues that they each managed to evoke in present-day America. In witnessing Zoe Saldana’s 2016 portrayal of Simone, for instance, Abdurraqib thinks back to his own childhood playing on the floor of his family home absorbing the powerful emotions caused by his mother’s 1964 recording of “Nina Simone in Concert”—and remembering the relentlessly stigmatized soul who, unlike Saldana, could not wash off her blackness at the end of the day. In listening to Springsteen, the author is reminded of the death of Michael Brown and how “the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal is coming from.” In all of Abdurraqib’s poetic essays, there is the artist, the work, the nation, and himself. The author effortlessly navigates among these many points before ultimately arriving at conclusions that are sometimes hopeful, often sorrowful, and always visceral.
Erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937512-65-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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