On Fiction
Fiction Illuminating History: Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters
Recently a call went out for contributors to a conference panel on the links between contemporary Asian American fiction writers’ experimentation and their groundedness in Asian American history and culture….
Restraint and Closure: The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
Books and movies very often remain interesting right up until the end, but concluding a narrative in a satisfying way seems to require an almost impossible fortitude. Plots fizzle; characters…
To Follow This Dark River: Echoes of Joseph Conrad in David Mitchell
“I think of it in terms of when I walk into a cathedral I don’t really understand the mechanics of the force that is keeping tons and tons of stone…
Truncated Memory: Carissa Halston’s The Mere Weight of Words
In her short story, “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” Alice Munro pulls off a spectacular flash-forward. It begins with more than a page of details about the parents of…
Anti-Social Behavior: the Novel
Asked in a 1995 interview about his fascination with Milton, Martin Amis described the loss of innocence in Paradise Lost as “the basic tragic story of our culture.” Milton, Amis…
Thank You for Smoking
Dr. Nicolas Monardes of Sevilla is a 16th century doctor convinced of the wide-ranging practicality of treating illnesses with tobacco, who is also, eventually, snuffed out by his own fervent…
Eyebrows, Cigarettes, Etcetera
In Ben Lerner’s debut novel, someone is always lighting a cigarette. Awkward social situation? Time for a smoke. Waiting for a table? Cigarette, please. Terrorist attacks on Madrid’s commuter trains?…
The Forty Days (and 80 Years) of Musa Dagh
Born in Prague in 1890, Franz Werfel lived a peripatetic life as a writer and traveler. He was employed as a teacher in Leipzig and then a soldier in what…
City of the Body
Preocupied with multiculturalism, grounded in urban existence, and resounding with echoes of highbrow European culture, Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City, would certainly appear messy and pedantic if written by…