Honeymoon, with Mermaids
Samantha Peale reviews Lydia Millet’s 'Mermaids in Paradise'
All Reviews
A Novel at War with Itself
The novel is, if not a “fragment,” then a vast agglutination of fragments, and at the same time a text, in the narrator’s words, “at war with itself."
Before the Fourth Wall: Reading “New World Drama”
If the theatrical performances of colonial America looked different than those of our own, did they mean something different, too?
The Lives of Our Memories
The story of the narrator’s conception and birth: Andrea Canobbio’s inverted bildungsroman.
When Going Back to the Land Goes Wrong
"The unstoppable parade of calamities invoked by the narrator suggests one of two things: either the book is a long, hard poke at rural fetishists, or it’s a sincere reproach to country life."
Infornography
In this novel about the destructive allure of sex and violence, the real shameful titillation comes from bingeing on sprinkles.
It’s the Emotions, Stupid
"How did the ideals of 1789 … morph into the horrors of 1793, steeped in blood, violence, and paranoia?"
City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America
Hirsch presents Halprin as a modernist builder of bold (and imperfect) ideas, rather than a post-modern deconstructionist challenging the language …
Starting Somewhere: Pico Iyer on Stillness
Iyer wants to make the conscious practice of stillness palatable to everyone.
Science, INC: On Mediating Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking teaches us how human beings make science together.
Sentences and Paragraphs to Make Old Age Bearable
"Hall tells us the meanest truth in such a way that we can smile about it."
More Ravishing with Each Blow
In her second novel, Reasons She Goes to the Woods, the Welsh writer Deborah Kay Davies places at the center of her narrative the dark materials that so often shape the mental lives of children: a parent’s mental illness, a preteen’s fierce sexual energy.
Too Much Magic, Too Little Social Friction: Why Objects Shouldn’t Be Enchanted
Magic’s unintended consequences.
G-Men as Literary Critics
"F.B. Eyes" shows the canon of modern black literature to have been powerfully — and dialogically — shaped by Hoover’s ghostreaders.
“The Strange Territory of That Room”
Kevin Allardice reviews 'The Absolution of Roberto Acestes' Laing by Nicholas Rombes
The Alien and the Intimate: The Writing of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s Poet-Frontman
The Writing of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s Poet-Frontman.
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