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…
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 meltdown and shaving her head for no clear reason made it really easy to conclude she was troubled if not severely mentally ill. Like a hit song taking on a life all its own, its words no longer restricted to the original text, scenes from her life constructed out of page three news and celebrity gossip columns took on the complexion of something very like but also much more narratively persuasive—simpler—than the life itself. For those used to construing everything Britney has said and done before, during, and after the thirteen years she spent under an exploitative conservatorship overseen by her ghoulish father Jamie Spears as being conditioned by her mental instability or personality flaws her memoir comes like a thief in the night.
Jennifer Ackerman
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…
Sporting Lint: A Review of Pockets by Hannah Carlson
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 shows we don’t always know why someone offends us—even if we think it has to do with what they do with their hands in our company. Hannah Carlson’s Pockets: An Intimate History of How we Keeps Things Close digs deeply, and eagerly probes for clues to the enigma of the pocket among the miscellany of fob watches, wallets, mobile phones, cosmetics, guns, and keys only—I think—to come up empty.
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.
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 six countries provide a comprehensive account of the productive tension between national and world cuisine, although a sequel covering other national cuisines is acknowledged as a live possibility. A first principles approach to the question of theorising the national dish shows even a book covering every existing national cuisine is not up to the task. This is because—as von Bremzen acknowledges—the constitutive concepts of nation and national culinary identity are themselves of recent vintage and subject to ongoing negotiation; they are open to influence from actors at home and abroad."
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.
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.
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.
Salman Rushdie Brushpen Portrait by Cain S. Pinto (2022)
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…