Literary Fiction

Read more about the article Interview with Jesse Kavadlo

Interview with Jesse Kavadlo

"Since 2021, book challenges in America have reached unprecedented levels. Literature is being pulled from the libraries and curricula of high schools for the same reasons that the PMRC objected to metal—mainly for sexual content, but also violence, occasionally the occult, and even a new category: a focus on race and/or anti-American viewpoints. The exact opposite of what I’d hoped is happening. I wanted heavy metal to be treated more like literature: worthy of analysis, accessible. Now, literature is being treated more like heavy metal, and not in a good way: objectionable, censored, rendered inaccessible to teens.” -Jesse Kavadlo

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Read more about the article Review: Mircea Cartarescu (2022) Solenoid.
Mircea Cartarescu

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 with this lexical arabesque delineating the contours of the possibility space occupied by human consciousness in an indifferent world? Solenoid answers the riddle by positioning itself qua literary work as a noble lie. In successfully reporting the narrator’s choice of the human satisfactions of love and commitment the literary work overcomes its chimerical destiny.

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Read more about the article Words Vanquish Swords Again
Rushdie's 15th Novel Victory City is a triumphant return to form

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 content to be entertained and edified. Those who, like humourless ayatollahs, can’t manage this are ineducable.

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Read more about the article Review: Sarah Thankam Mathews (2022) All This Could Be Different. Viking.

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, personality-effacing style of writers coming out of MFA programs.

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Read more about the article Review: Avner Landes (2021) Meiselman: The Lean Years.
Watercolour Portrait by Cain S. Pinto (2022)

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 tries valiantly to rise to each description. Alas, yeast is wanting. 

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Read more about the article Review: Blake Bailey (2021) Philip Roth: The Biography, Skyhorse Publishing.
Watercolour portrait by Cain S. Pinto (2022)

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.

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