Marie Calloway, What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life
reviewed by Alexis Forss
What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, the debut work of blogger Marie Calloway, is a work that is formally distinguished and thematically urgent in ways that both belie and betoken the author’s 21 years, but that’s not what’s really at stake here. Indeed, reviewing this book has made me guilty of a number of things, among them two minor infractions of Anthony Lane’s maxims for critics:
1) never read the publicity material, and
2) whenever possible, pass sentence on the day after... [read more]
Towards the end of the 1984 mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, the band look back on their career. Although the American tour they’ve just finished has been an unmitigated disaster — they’ve lost their lead guitarist, been overshadowed by miniature scenery and played support to a puppet act — guitarist David St Hubbins and bassist Derek Smalls are in good spirits.
‘We’re lucky you know,’ says Smalls, ‘people should be envying us.’
‘I envy us,’ muses St.... [read more]
Finn Brunton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
reviewed by Robert Barry
Two weeks ago, I received an email from a Mr Zaheya E. Attar, Secretary to the Internal Auditor of the General National Bank of Dubai, containing the promise of ‘a very confidential and profitable business proposal.’ It would seem that a consultant for Chevron, Mr. Richard Burson, having deposited $10million in Attar's branch, had had the misfortune to perish in a plane crash in 1999. ‘The most astonishing of my discovery,’ Mr Attar informed me, employing a grammar unique to the... [read more]
It is a rare event that a 254-page book on narrative morphology hits high street bookshops as part of a ‘double-release’. But then, Franco Moretti has always worked hard to bypass the closed-circuit hubris of academic publishing. This is the same author, of course, who with the charismatic flair of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has periodically descended from his world-famous tenure at Stanford University’s ‘Literary Lab’ to proclaim certain millenarian truths: the advent of a digital... [read more]
Janet McCabe & Kim Akass (eds.), TV's Betty Goes Global: From Telenovela to International Brand
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
Ugly Betty has changed her name many times in recent years as she travelled and was reborn in South Africa, Greece, Spain, China, Israel. But unusually she first appeared on Colombian television screens, as Betty la Fea, between 1999 and 2001, in a soap opera – or telenovela – which was to become, more than any other Latin American series, a global franchise. This collection of essays explores the reasons for its enormous (and continuing) success in so many different cultures. At one level... [read more]
The publication of All That Is, James Salter’s first novel in 34 years, has been a major literary event. Some critics, ever eager for an angle, have seized on the fact that the author will turn 88 this year. Others have used the book as an opportunity to reassess the North American canon and lament Salter’s lack of renown and recognition, describing him variously as ‘the best living American author you’ve never heard of’ and ‘one of the great American post-war writers’. The phrase... [read more]
Andrew Adonis, 5 Days in May: The Coalition and Beyond
reviewed by Abigail Rhodes
5 Days in May is written by the Labour Party peer, Lord Andrew Adonis, from the perspective of his party during the negotiations that followed the UK General Election of 2010. In the Introduction, written in April 2013, the sense of ‘historic importance’ of these five days in May 2010 is, in hindsight, given its full weight. The first half of the book was written in June 2010 in the style of a diary and catalogues the interactions between the ‘dramatis personae’ (listed at the start... [read more]
Through the eyes of a young woman from Nevada we see the colourful, vibrant scene of the 1970s SoHo art world. Through these same eyes we see masked men and angry women thronging in protest on the streets of Rome during the Years of Lead. The young woman, Reno, is the narrator of Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, The Flamethrowers. She arrives on the New York art scene with aspiration. She is into motorcycles and ski racing – which she describes as ‘drawing in time’ – and soon becomes... [read more]
Thomas Wartenberg, A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Children's Literature
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
The guiding idea of Sneetch is that philosophy is connected to childhood via children’s ‘innate inquisitiveness’, their ‘Why? Why? Why?’ questioning. And that picture books – like Dr Seuss’ The Sneetches – capture philosophical issues and can be used by parents to cultivate philosophical questioning. It’s an idea in the tradition of Gareth Matthews’ seminal 1980 book Philosophy and the Young Child. Matthews presented evidence that young children ask questions that are... [read more]
Harmony Korine is best known for writing the film Kids (1995) at the age of 19, which follows the 16-year-old-skater Teller as he spreads HIV amongst New York’s barely-pubescent virgins. Korine went on to direct Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Mister Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009). The bizarre and dark humour of his films has garnered them a large cult following. His book, A Crackup at the Race Riots, was initially released by Doubleday in 1998; Korine’s cult-status meant... [read more]
