Book Reviews
Review of Am I a Redundant Human Being?
Am I a Redundant Human Being? This question is the title of Austrian writer Mela Hartwig’s early 20th-century novel – now out from Dalkey Archive Press in a translation by Kerrie Pierce – and Hartwig gives it to a relentlessly wordy, wildly contradictory, and sadistic narrator to answer. Aloisia Schmidt is a lonely young woman whose only means of holding herself together is to pit herself against herself in a masturbatory mental trial in which she plays all roles: jury, judge, defendant, and victim. She leaves little room for anyone else’s interpretation – even yours. This is a one-woman show.read »
Fiction
Grief!
Fiction
I stub my toe on a woman. She’s spread out next to the tub. Her breasts rise and fall. I reach down and rub the hair on her legs. There’s a skirt over her important areas. She’s got a face like a sprain. If she wakes up, I believe I can help her. I’m not a bad man. The poor…
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Noma Plus
Fiction
one lightsoff acceleration go and he found himself moving arrhythmically across the surface of an abandoned parking lot and she was backlit by the diffident blaze of a burning mailbox at the edge of a sidewalk shattered into fragments like a bar of bleached chocolate and his brain reciprocated like a pane of spun stunt sugar and the faded lines…
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Yarnivores
Fiction
You’ll probably find this funny, because people usually find it funny when I tell them. I used to work as a waiter at this place called Merry Olde England British Pub over in Five Points. Obviously, that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that I had to dress in a bowler hat and talk in a phony English…
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Strangers In the Living Room
Fiction
When I got to Matt’s house, he met me at the door with this puzzled look on his face. There were strangers in the living room. “Who are they?” I asked. “I don’t know.” “Jehovah’s Witnesses? Mormons?” “I don’t think so.” “Friends of Donna’s?” “I guess so.” “Hi, I’m Bill,” I said, walking in and shaking hands with the nearest…
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Columns
Virtual Mother
Columns
My birth mother sends me messages on MySpace. She’s 68 years old, creeping around a website where friend is a verb and teenagers want someone to tell them they’re pretty. She lives alone. She drinks and thinks too much, and sometimes, usually after midnight, she…
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No Way Out: Jason Starr’s “Fake I.D.”
Columns
By now, fans of Hard Case Crime’s brand of pulp crime fiction already know Jason Starr. Along with the delightfully cynical crime writer Ken Bruen of Ireland, Starr co-authored Bust, Slide, and The Max—a wicked trilogy reveling in dark humor, gratuitous sex & violence, and…
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Christa Faust’s Money Shot Cashes In
Columns
Hard Case Crime recently turned 50. The independent publishing house dedicated to all things pulp has published over 50 titles since it opened for business in 2005. And what a business for lovers of crime fiction: HCC not only reissues out of print classics by…
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Doing It Right: Interview with Gregg Hurwitz
Columns
Los Angeles. The city of (fallen) angels has lured many crime fiction writers over the years, its truths often stranger than fiction. From Hollywood to Echo Park, L.A. is a siren song of corruption, racial tension, drugs, and silicone implants. Perfect grist for a writer’s…
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Easyreeder
Columns
WEEK 1 UNRELIABLE NARRATOR Do you want a reliable narrator? An unreliable narrator? If there is any first-person element to your narration, there’s one answer: all people lie to themselves, all people are unreliable. The question is of degree. While extremely unreliable narrators are fascinating…
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Interviews
Blue-Eyed Devil: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight
Interviews
by David Hunter On the surface, Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America seems like it will be a "let's get to know the neighbors" punk-rock companion piece to Paul Barrett's American Islam. If that doesn't quite describe it, it's because author Michael Muhammad…
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Ken Foster: From Literary Impressario to Pit Bull Advocate
Interviews
Not a Sunday night goes by when I don't think of Ken Foster. As I stand behind the duct-taped podium wedged in the corner of the KGB Bar, just as I am about to introduce the authors, I think: Would he approve of my selection?…
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Jhumpa Lahiri on PEN’s World Voices
Interviews
Interview by Suzanne Dottino I met Jhumpa Lahiri when she read from her novel, The Namesake , at KGB Bar as part of the Sunday Night Fiction Series along with Susan Choi (author of American Woman). Jhumpa arrived carrying her firstborn wrapped in a blanket…
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On a Clear Night You Can Read Forever: Scribblers on the Roof
Interviews
by Mary Phillips-Sandy For more than fifty years a synagogue has stood at the northeast corner of West End Avenue and West 100th Street in Manhattan. The synagogue is called Congregation Ansche Chesed, and in the summer of 1999 its roof became home to an…
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Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi
Interviews
by John Haskell I recently went to the show at the Noguchi Museum called "Best of Friends," an exhibition chronicling the collaborations between Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, and what struck me wasn't the work itself, but the sense of idealism that their work was…
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Book Reviews
Whitehorn’s Windmill
Book Reviews
Upon beginning Kazys Boruta’s novel Whitehorn’s Windmill or The Unusual Events Once Upon a Time in the Land of Paudruvė, the reader will first be struck – and perhaps put off – by the simple, informal prose and fairy-tale setting. But this mid-20th-century Lithuanian classic – now out in an English translation from Central European University Press – is anything but provincial. Boruta weaves witches, old crones, morose devils, and talking animals together with the poetics of the most sophisticated – and pessimistic – European modernism.
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Three Delays
Book Reviews
Don’t ask me about the three delays of Charlie Smith’s new novel, Three Delays. Who or what’s delayed, when, why – whether there are any delays at all – I couldn’t tell you.
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Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever
Book Reviews
Intentionally or not, there’s much about Justin Taylor’s debut collection that leans towards earnest generational portraiture, what Fredric Jameson called “taking the temperature of an age.” Goths, grunge kids and anarcho-punks emerge as nostalgic figures of a 90s suburban landscape. These are the bored young things who curate their identities by the bands they listen to, the mall accessories they choose to wear. The kids hang out, drop acid, experiment with sexual identities, find each other in twin-size beds and part ways ruefully. Yet despite their follies and privileges they are not altogether unlovable.
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Primeval and Other Times
Book Reviews
Tellingly, in the original Polish, Primeval is ‘Prawiek’; translatable as ‘Long Ago’, the term also describes old-woodlands found throughout Eastern Europe. It is here, amongst these dense forests, that the sphere of the sacred blends with the profane, as mystical phenomena, Catholicism, holiness and spirituality intertwine with the everyday. A microcosm of Polish towns of the period, Primeval is to Tokarczuk what Visĕgrad was to Ivo Andrić in The Bridge over the Drina. The author is the village’s chronicler and documents what she feels is worthy of retelling, combining fact and fiction to serve her own myth-making purpose.
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Self-Portrait Abroad
Book Reviews
For years I’ve been telling friends, acquaintances, even people at parties I speak to for five minutes, to read Jean-Philippe Toussaint. But I always have difficulty recommending a novel of his to start with. Though Toussaint is never less than lucid, nuanced, and very funny, and, like Chaplin or Woody Allen, frequently features the same protagonist – a resolutely passive upper-middle-class intellectual who somehow keeps getting into slapstick situations – there isn’t a single one of his books that shows off all he can do.
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