Summer: such a blur. Here’s the most recent set of Hot Reads! If you read just one of these books, let it be Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls. It was hard to do it justice in less than 300 words.
Tag Archives: books
A Fort of Nine Towers
I reviewed A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar in today’s New York Times Book Review. A snippet:
The collective memory of prewar life repeatedly saves Omar and his family. The bloodthirsty horticulturist drops his threats when he realizes he is menacing the father and son of his beloved boxing instructor. The leader of the tunnel diggers is none other than their old gardener’s assistant, a hardworking teenager and Omar’s partner in kite-fighting; upon finding his old employer’s son and grandson in captivity he orders their immediate release. Omar’s retelling startlingly transforms each horror into a reminder of what lies beneath the rubble: an openhearted, hospitable community of generous, gregarious people, “one minute laughing and the next minute shouting” and always fiercely loyal to their kind.
Hot Reads: On Sal Mal Lane, The Watch Tower, Fools
Check out my reviews of Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane, The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower and Fools by Joan Silber at The Daily Beast.
The Critic’s Global Voice
With more than 100 world-class writers in dozens events spanning a week, this year’s PEN World Voices Festival line-up is pretty daunting. I did manage to carve out time to make it out for a few things– and I blogged about an event earlier this week for Words Without Borders. The topic was “The Critic’s Global Voice,” and the panel featured Jean-Euphèle Milcé, Ursula Krechel, and Mikhail Shishkin (with Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio moderating):
Reports of the death of American literary culture have been, well, at least a little exaggerated. There’s no other way to explain the steady stream of lively essays bemoaning the health of book reviews, book critics, and literature itself. “Like hazing, reviewing is inflicted by the old and popular on the young and weak,” Elizabeth Gumport wrote, dismissing the genre in n+1. Literary culture is in the midst of a “long slide, reflecting not just a hard market but the manners of a bygone world,” as Michael Wolff recently put it in a churlish column predicting the demise of the New York Times Book Review. At any rate, “most contemporary literary fiction is terrible,” J. Robert Lennon griped in Salon.
But what of the rest of the world? Are we to believe that such assessments hold true for the public dialogue about books—and the role of “professional” readers—in other languages, other markets, other cultures? Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio put the question of the role of criticism to writers from Russia (Mikhail Shishkin), Haiti (Jean-Euphèle Milcé), and Germany (Ursula Krechel) in a Wednesday night PEN festival discussion of “The Critic’s Global Voice.”
Head over to Words Without Borders for the rest of my dispatch, and for coverage of other PEN events (there’s a nice dispatch on the “Speaking in Languages on the Edge,” event, and interview with Susan Bernofsky, host of “How to Be a Translator” — and more coverage to come).
Hot Reads: Snapper, The Humanity Project, Red Spectres, My Animals and Other Family, The Other Side of the Tiber
From a lovestruck bird-chasing ecologist to the forgotten Gothic literature of 20th cent Russia: This week’s reviews are up. Read more at Newsweek / The Daily Beast.
How to Create the Perfect Wife
Thomas Day was wealthy and educated and ran in influential circles. But there was one problem. The 18th-century British philosopher’s lack of interest in polite manners and fashion—and, more important, personal hygiene—made it difficult for him to attract a suitable mate.
Day liked to quote a line from a poem titled “Advice to the Ladies”: “Wit like wine intoxicates the brain/Too strong for feeble women to sustain.”
You can find my full review of Wendy Moore’s utterly creepy and completely factual biography of Day, How to Create the Perfect Wife over at The Daily Beast / Newsweek.
Hot Reads: Kings of the Road, Equilateral, The Pink Hotel, My Bright Abyss
This week’s Hot Reads feature a pink hotel, a red planet, a bright abyss, and a giant burning triangle. Also, men in very short shorts. Splendid books all around. Visit The Daily Beast for the full reviews.
Hot Reads: The New Mind of the South, Honor, Between Man and Beast, A Tale for the Time Being, On the Ropes
This week’s Hot Reads feature Japanese tsunami flotsam, “the ‘two-ness’ of Southerners,” an honor killing in 1970s London, and gorillas.
Hot Reads: Middle Men, A Week in Winter, An Armenian Sketchbook, The Teleportation Accident, The Searchers
Featuring a John Wayne western, teleportation experiments, indigestion in Armenia, and the highways of Los Angeles. The full reviews here.
Hot Reads: The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, The Last Girlfriend of Earth, See Now Then, City of Devi
This week’s Hot Reads are all about looking for love — on stage, through a collapsed marriage, under the threat of nuclear destruction and even in the Gowanus Canal. The full reviews are here.
Mythili G. Rao 