Martin Amis’s latest novel takes place (mostly) in a Russian labor camp and is suitably dark and dismal. Written as a confessional, the narrator recounts to his daughter his life prior to, during, and after his imprisonment in the labor camp. Most of the story revolves around his relationship with his brother, who married the […]
I had planned to start this little review like this: Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone is a rather unmemorable collection of personal essays dealing with and recalling, among other things, his relationship with his parents, adolescence, birding, and Snoopy, and is much less focused than his previous book of essays How To Be Alone. Then […]
Franzen’s wonderful collection of essays tied together by the themes of privacy and how to be alone in a world of unparalled media saturation (and his search for the meaning of writing the contemporary social novel and whether or not anyone cares). With so many media options and outlets vying for our attention and for […]
DeLillo’s irony-clad postmodern critique of consumerism, media saturation, conspiracy, the potential positive effects of violence, and mortality. Written in 1985, there are times that the book is eerily prophetic: the pronouncement that in times of disaster it’s the lower class people who are forgotten sounds a lot like what happened in the wake of hurricane […]
When Jonathan Franzen wrote a letter to Don DeLillo lamenting the death of the social novel and his (Franzen’s) place in the world as a fiction writer, this is part of the reply that he (DeLillo) sent:
“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making […]
David Simon and Ed Burns are two angry men. Angry about how the “war on drugs”—a war they liken to Vietnam—is being waged, or rather, isn’t being waged. For Simon and Burns, the war on drugs is just one misguided attempt to reassure the American public that the government is doing something to remedy the […]
SLN is happy to oblige Helen and her latest scheme meme:
Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.
“They all turn to Tae, who puts his head down and stares […]
The McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern has been around since 1998, when Dave Eggers started the not-quite-quarterly journal to publish his own work as well as pieces by his friends, many of which (the pieces by his (Dave Eggers’) friends) had been rejected by other literary journals. Over the years, the QC has evolved from a simple […]
DFW is a literary virtuoso. Consider the Lobster is his latest collection of essays and obsrvations, and includes pieces on such disparate subjects as a talk radio host, the Maine Lobster Festival, the Adult Video Awards, and the 2000 McCain campaign. Fans of DFW will not be disappointed. And if you’ve never read anything by […]
“Invok[ing] the soul-killing anonymity of chain hotels, the rooms’ terrible transient sameness: the ubiquitous floral design of the bedspreads, the multiple low-watt lamps, the pallid artwork bolted to the wall, the schizoid whisper of ventilation, the sad shag carpet, the smell of alien cleansers, the Kleenex dispensed from the wall, the automated wake-up call, the […]