Wednesday, March 13 2013
Bill’s Beatdown: ‘Donnybrook’
Frank Bill’s stories are as rough as they come, hard packages of violence and sadness, tales of lives ripped apart by poverty and shame.
Tuesday, March 12 2013
On the Psychic Life of Paperwork: Ben Kafka’s ‘The Demon of Writing’
This critical history and theory of paperwork traces its origins to the inception of the bureaucratic state during the French Revolution in order to sketch out the powers and failures of paperwork.
This Is Baby-Makin’ Music, but Only Bedtime Reading: ‘98% Funky Stuff’
His sax leads might lead to sex, but his prose might make you doze.
Monday, March 11 2013
‘Vampires in the Lemon Grove’ Collapses Boundaries of Genre and Human Possibility
Vampires in the Lemon Grove brings together eight stories of transmutation, transmigration and transgression for a collection that enchants and beguiles throughout.
For When You Wonder if You’ll Ever Be Published: ‘Always Apprentices’
Because writing is such a solitary pursuit, writers adrift in the seas of the obscure and unpublished need anything they can get to defend themselves against the onslaught of ‘better sense’.
Friday, March 8 2013
Dead Philosophers Are Cool: ‘Philosophy Bites Back’
Every interview in this book rewards us with the revelation that a great philosopher, no matter how dead, is still fresh, surprising, and relevant.
Thursday, March 7 2013
‘Coral Glynn’, Wherein Inference Speaks Volumes
I love Peter Cameron’s attention to absurdity. I love that his conversations sometimes lead nowhere, and often the conversations are about one subject, on the surface, but about something quite different between the lines.
Lady Lazarus Rises Again in ‘American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath’
However good his intentions, Carl Rollyson appears to forget that Sylvia Plath’s surviving friends and family must share her with a voracious industry eager for every last bloody scrap.
Wednesday, March 6 2013
When Silence Is Calamitous: ‘Music, Politics, and Violence’
“We cannot use music to keep our reflections on violence at some respectful distance. Indeed, we must uncover precisely how music does its cultural work, which is what the essays in this volume seek to do” (12).
Witches, Murder, and Sadism: The Need to Rescue ‘Dario Argento’
Dario Argento's mixture of hyper-visual imagery, fetishistic violence, and unbridled suspense cannot be easily replicated -- nor can it be easily explicated.
Tuesday, March 5 2013
Hong Kong Pop and Its Discontents: ‘Sonic Multiplicities’
This work of cultural theory analyses the material and geopolitical implications of Hong Kong pop music and culture production and consumption, unsettling boundaries, national identities, and "the diaspora" vs "the local".
On Treating Subjectivity with Respect: ‘The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music’
The inclination to quarrel with Dylan Jones one minute and smirk gleefully the next is strong, especially when he can dismiss Sonic Youth's entire career in two lines, and then devote 12 pages to Ringo Starr.
Monday, March 4 2013
Twelve Hard Slaps to the Face: Susan Steinberg’s ‘Spectacle’
These thematically interconnected stories make for a stylish, thrilling ride.
‘The Rise of the Vampire’ Reads Almost Like a Narrative of Immigration
Essentially, the vampire is considered as an ‘other’ in a similar manner to the way in which immigrants are othered, and in this way the narrative of immigration that runs through the book is given a greater relevance
Friday, March 1 2013
Forever Stuck in the Past: ‘Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life’
Rather than promoting a spokesman for our times, Jonathan Sperber argues that Marx's ideas have run their course.
Thursday, February 28 2013
Methodical Dehumanization: ‘Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam’
We all know the common adage that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. After reading this book, I wonder if the American government has learned anything from Vietnam.
A Swing and a Miss: ‘The Burgess Boys’
In The Burgess Boys, Elizabeth Strut oversimplifies the world. She wants to argue for her own unique hypothesis about how life works—and yet the hypothesis seems inadequate.
Wednesday, February 27 2013
‘Percival Everett by Virgil Russell’ Toys with Voice and Identity, and Bonds Between Father and Son
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is a pas-de-deux for father and son. But don’t come to this expecting anything you can find on a greeting card. This is still a Percival Everett novel, after all.
Tuesday, February 26 2013
Sentimentality, Captured Beautifully: ‘Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s’
We’re meant to understand something more about our ability to respond to the images around us. We’re shaped emotionally by images, and new, unconventional readings of history can be enriched by mining through them.
Monday, February 25 2013
David Shields’ ‘How Literature Saved My Life’ Substitutes Flaccidity for Fervor
How Literature Saved My Life is a writer lying himself out on an operating table, using art—movies, music, literature—as a scalpel, and somehow managing to spill very little blood.
