Why Go There? A Defense of Travel Agnosticism
Spelled out more concretely, with the inconvenient specificity of actual locales, cultures, and ethnic identities the praise heaped on travel as a beneficial transformative experience becomes untenable. Few well-intentioned people—though there will always be some—will encourage well-heeled foreigners to tour the slums of Uganda, imbibe warthog anuses with Namibian bushmen, or see…
Nothingburger: Andrew Friedman’s The Dish is a poor man’s fare
Food writer Andrew Friedman’s latest book The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food seems misleadingly titled to give the impression it would tackle the very concept of the dish: a freestanding food item that can do duty as main course in the pan-cultural human ritual of imbibing aliment…
Surviving Success: A Review of Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me
You can hardly blame people for misunderstanding Britney and misconstruing her circumstances, but after the memoir it is all the harder to ignore their casual commentarial cruelty. Reports about Britney getting snapped partying panty-less with and without Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, marrying a childhood friend for a day, having a public…
He’s Back. But Why? A review of Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger
What’s it now?If I were to begin a review of a motivational book in keeping with the tone and compositional principle of the work I would begin by quoting a famous personality. Let’s pick Bernard Shaw. He said, “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach.” This is eerily descriptive of Schwarzenegger’s…
Review: What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman
There are 250 extant owl species known today though there is fossil evidence for a hundred species that have come and gone. Surprisingly, scientists keep finding new species and the number of species might yet continue to grow as we’re able to locate and identify owls in regions previously inaccessible to naturalists.…
Sporting Lint: A Review of Pockets by Hannah Carlson
The beginning of wisdom about body language is the universal validity of the nostrum: keep your hands out of your pockets. The perdurable infamy associated with enjoying the mere power of containment besom pockets offer and the contradictory attitudes attributed to anyone consummating the mute repose of putting their hands in them…
Review: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport puts you in the home, head, and heart of a woman whose name you never learn. She comports herself with the familiarity of a friend or family member. You’ll hear recipes, rants about Donald Trump, “Open Carry guy” used as a slur, reports about a lioness separated from…
Review: Amy Bruni’s Life With the Afterlife
Many people who believe in ghosts tend to outright disbelieve in the existence of cryptids, and aliens (Ch. 10). From a scientific point of view the existence of alien life seems vastly more probably than that of ghosts. If you believe in ghosts you can do worse than believing in Bigfoot. Not…
Review: Mircea Cartarescu (2022) Solenoid.
Whether literature will save us or not is a poetic question, and the narrator’s prosaic denunciation of its false promises cannot settle the matter one way or another. Towards the end the narrator throws his manuscript into a burning abyss, choosing to save his child with Irina. How then are we left…
Review: Ed Conway (2023) Material World. Knopf.
What do Donald Trump and Chairman Mao have in common? The belief that “IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY.” Frank Zappa thought you also need a beer—but that’s neither here nor there. Conway’s 2023 narrative science doorstopper is here to deliver a slightly different, less zingy but more…
Words Vanquish Swords Again
In the final section Pampa Kampana, coming to terms with the decline of the Vijayanagar empire, reflects that “words are the only victors.” Rushdie is alive to that scruple and will not let the moralising impulse detract from the power of words. Let those who want to learn something from fiction be…
Spare No Blushes
Prince Harry’s subversion of the usually triumphalist genre has paradoxically accomplished the feat of making him come across as a loser who is disingenuous due to and not just despite his performative authenticity. One thing’s for certain: the royal family he’s estranged from would’ve spared him from this disgraceful public tantrum by…
Review: Avner Landes (2021) Meiselman: The Lean Years.
The titular protagonist of Meiselman: The Lean Years has at the age of thirty-six had an epiphany: he’s been a pushover ever since he can remember, and he doesn’t want to be the good guy who finishes last. He is neither a hero nor a celebrity, neither likeable nor engaging though he…
Review: Anya von Bremzen (2023) National Dish
“Focusing on iconic dishes from Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca, and Istanbul von Bremzen attempts to bring light rather than the usual heat to the concept of a national dish in a globalized world where surprisingly nationalism is resurgent. She doesn’t to her credit pretend that stories about a few dishes from…
Review: Sarah Thankam Mathews (2022) All This Could Be Different. Viking.
Sarah Thankam Mathew’s All This Could be Different has been marketed, and widely reviewed, as a novel in which electric prose serves a calling higher than the merely aesthetic. The prose here is au courant, fluent in the meme-inflected argot of the relatively young extremely online reader, and exemplary of the transparent,…
Review: Blake Bailey (2021) Philip Roth: The Biography, Skyhorse Publishing.
Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth biography has something for everyone: it satisfies the reader who wants to relive the rapture of reading Roth at his best, the literary dilettante who wants to bone up on dinner table banter about notable priapic penpushers, and aspiring heirs to Roth’s ballpoint sceptre.
Kevin Kwan Explains “Crazy Rich Asians”
David Sedaris’ Tips for Humour Writing
Anybody can be a storyteller and a humourist because interesting things happen to everyone, and there is humour to be found in almost every indignity. “Everything’s funny eventually” says Sedaris, and he must know as he’s able to laugh about having a flexible metal tube inserted into his urethral meatus as part…
Salman Rushdie’s Tips for Writing & Storytelling
Novices and accomplished writers alike seem to agree that writing is hard. One would be a fool, then, to pass up on hard won insights from an author of twenty novels, and the winner of the Booker prize and the Booker of Bookers prize. Salman Rushdie Teaches Story Telling and Writing, a…
Review: Jonathan Franzen (2021) Crossroads. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In “Crossroads” Jonathan Franzen flaunts his complete abandonment of any pretence to style; substance and form have fought each other, and substance stands undefeated, gloating, on the corpse of form.