“Do We Need Stories?” “Why Finish Books?” “What’s Wrong with the Nobel?” “Does Money Make Us Write Better?” Readers vexed by...
Why do books matter?
British novelist, essayist, translator, and critic Parks (Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo, 2013, etc.) considers the current state of writing and reading in short, contemplative literary musings. Organized into four sections—The World Around the Book, The Book in the World, The Writer’s World, and Writing Across Worlds—the essays focus on the challenges writers face in defining their literary boundaries. In the author’s view, creative writing programs teach novelists “how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in their own culture.” This “standardization and flattening” of narrative reflects students’ anxiety about getting published, which in turn often makes literary fiction predictable and unimaginative. Pressure to market books globally has led, the author believes, to “a slow weakening of the sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which writers make their own urgent narrative contributions.” As a teacher and practitioner of translation, Parks devotes many essays to its problems: the struggle to translate unexpected syntax or subtly novel ideas and the relationship between semantic sense and “the acoustic inertia” of a language. Translated texts, he notes, “tend to be cooler, a little less fluid” than their originals. Although translations make up only 3 to 4 percent of novels published in America, English dominates publishing in other countries, leading some European writers to emulate English syntax. Parks refers often to writers he esteems, such as D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett, Peter Stamm, and Henry Green. Jonathan Franzen, who he thinks is overrated, is not among them.
“Do We Need Stories?” “Why Finish Books?” “What’s Wrong with the Nobel?” “Does Money Make Us Write Better?” Readers vexed by such questions will welcome Parks’ thoughtful responses.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59017-884-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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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