When a small press starts a pamphlet series with a publication about a fictional Nintendo Entertainment System character, we know we are entering into the realm of the niche interest. ‘I wonder if I am capable/ of love. I take meals,/inside of me – I don’t make eye contact, /or speak,’ delivers the poem’s speaker, a tiny 2D action figure in the original 8-bit NES game but here in this 'fifteen part persona poem' expressed with a psychology that is human in its neurosis. Lines like... [read more]
Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
reviewed by Lucie Elliott
Whatever happened to Interracial Love? is the title of Kathleen Collins’ collection of short stories and a question posed throughout. The stories were written between 1970 and 1980, published for the first time in the UK by Granta, almost 40 years since their conception and 30 years since Collins’s untimely death at 46. Collins had worked as an editor, a French teacher and Film professor at CCNY; she was also a playwright, known in academic circles as a pioneer in black independent... [read more]
Heads up, Cara Hoffman’s Running is not about that deeply middle-class pastime of putting on trainers and hoofing a 5k with other well-fed, health-minded locals. Running in Hoffman’s book is lying – it’s a hustle – done by a cast of wasters who work the inbound trains, selling unsuspected tourists on low-end hotels in the red-light district of Athens, Greece. In exchange, these kids get a little drinking money and a roof over their heads. It’s a close-to-the-bone existence that... [read more]
Eric Foner, Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History
reviewed by Tom Cutterham
Born to a family of communists and labour organisers in 1940s New York, and trained as a historian there in the 1960s, Eric Foner has for the best part of a generation been one of the leading historians both in and of the United States. His retirement from Columbia University last year has provided a number of opportunities to reflect on Foner's towering intellectual achievements – including a conference in his honour at Columbia this month, and this book, which collects some of his... [read more]
Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies
reviewed by James Williams
In its subtitle, ‘Orality and Its Technologies,’ The Ethnography of Rhythm anticipates comparisons to what doubtless remains the most familiar touchstone in discussions of orality, Walter J. Ong’s 1982 work Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Haun Saussy’s account, though, amounts to a deft sidestepping of some of the temptation toward grander narrative which Ong’s classic reading may provoke. Instead of insisting upon any sharp distinction between orality and... [read more]
Alex Wong’s Poems without Irony demands an uneasy amount of ‘intelligence’ and ‘care’ from its readers. The collection never panders. Nor do its poems ever indulge readers’ idle tastes, sentiments, and ideas. Poems without Irony, rather, invites and challenges. Its poems ask their readers to ‘enter into’ the self-governing worlds created and communicated by them; and to come equipped with the literary and the experiential knowledge to navigate them. To accept these invitations... [read more]
Emmanuel Todd, Who Is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class
reviewed by Ian Birchall
The forthcoming French presidential elections will be haunted by the violence of the last few years. The appalling murders of the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 were followed by massive demonstrations, involving up to four million people, under the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’ [I am Charlie]. Amid this display of national unity and ‘republican values’ there were few discordant voices – but one which provoked considerable controversy was this little... [read more]
In his lecture on the metaphor, Borges speculates that abstract thought demands the suppression of the traces of bodily experience inherent to its language: the being with the stars that is consideration, the incubation that is brooding, the distance that abides inside of longing. His observation is germane to a dichotomy proposed by Kate Zambreno in 2012’s Heroines, which perseveres in the just-published Book of Mutter. Both are meditations on women’s lives as raw material, where all the... [read more]
Adam Alter, Irresistible: Why We Can't Stop Checking, Scrolling, Clicking and Watching
reviewed by Sam Gregory
What’s the deal with those couples you see in the pub staring at their phones in silence? Is it OK to find that odd, even sad, or does that make you a neo-Luddite, a reactionary old bore mourning the days when drinking dens were focal points of real-life face-to-face interaction? In Irresistible, Adam Alter argues that we are all that couple to one degree or another, each of us trapped in a loveless relationship with digital devices that are making us unhappier and unhealthier.... [read more]
It is hard not to be awed by Eimear McBride’s follow-up to her award-winning debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013). Although echoes of her previous novel are clear, McBride presents a wholly new kind of story in The Lesser Bohemians. Like in Girl our protagonist is female, again on the cusp of adulthood, ‘before I became what I’ve become – a form of a thing,’ but the process of formation in Bohemians is stronger. Rather than remaining ‘half-formed’ or dissolving completely,... [read more]
