Readers of George Saunders’ first and most brilliant short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Random House, 1996), will be familiar with the strange spectacles of artifice and corporate cultivations of reality that compose his debut version of modern America, in which the approximated and poorly-rehearsed gimmick of the real supplants the real itself. In his most recent work, Tenth of December, only the remnants of this world remain. Less concerned with the miscarriage of good... [read more]
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
reviewed by Marc Farrant
Fredric Jameson, now 78, is undoubtedly the leading Marxist critic in North America, and has carried this mantle since at least the publication of The Political Unconscious in 1981. Arguably, however, Jameson is most well-known for the publication (originally in essay form) of Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991). Jameson's theorisation of postmodernism as the lived experience of late capitalism - of the time of a ‘perpetual present’ - has... [read more]
Judith Butler & Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political
reviewed by Sarah Keenan
I had high hopes for this book. Iconic critical theorist and public intellectual Judith Butler teaming up with exciting young feminist theorist Athena Athanasiou to work towards an understanding of dispossession beyond the logic of possession. That is, to seek an understanding of, and take a normative stance in relation to urgent political issues of dispossession (such as forced migration, homelessness, foreclosures, and extreme disparities in wealth) without resorting to an argument that... [read more]
Julian Barnes, Through the Window: Seventeen essays (and one short story)
reviewed by Alexis Forss
Julian Barnes may bristle at the attempt at maxim-coining, as he does at those of Connolly, Wilde, and La Rochefoucauld, but the attempt shall be made nonetheless: an author finding himself in possession of the Booker Prize shall also find himself in possession of a soapbox. That this soapbox may be experienced as more of a station of the cross than a venerated pulpit is borne out by the recent example of double-winner Hilary Mantel, whose comments on the Duchess of Cambridge were subtle and... [read more]
Following her recent success as an independently published Man Booker Prize 2012 shortlistee, Deborah Levy’s latest literary gem is a beguiling collection of short stories, Black Vodka. Like its predecessor, Swimming Home (And Other Stories, 2011), this slim volume of ten short stories is a testament to Levy’s power of subversion; complex motifs bubble disturbingly beneath seemingly conventional storylines.
The collection explores the themes of love, depression and estrangement in... [read more]
Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler (eds.), It’s The Political Economy, Stupid: The Global Financial Crisis in Art and Theory
reviewed by Pascal Porcheron
It’s the Political Economy, Stupid is both a book and a series of artist-curated exhibitions intended as a response to the various crises that have engulfed the world’s economies, leading to one of the deepest, longest recessions in living memory. It is designed, as the book’s editors put it, to be ‘an object lesson in backtalk, of impertinence objectified’. Of course ‘impertinence objectified’ might easily be read as ‘stylised protest’, a fate made poignant by the book’s... [read more]
Jeffrey Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food
reviewed by Sarah Emily Duff
In his collection of essays Recipes for Sad Women (Pushkin Press, 2012), the Colombian writer Héctor Abad warns his readers against ‘[t]hose who reproach you for your foreign dishes’:
if they believe their past is unique, that they’re not a miscellaneous mixture of American, European and Africa, then let them devote themselves to cultivating their limited horizons.
He suggests that those who insist upon eating only that which is absolutely ‘authentic’ should consume only... [read more]
In Hitler’s Philosophers Yvonne Sherratt seeks to examine the role of thinkers living in Germany during the Third Reich. The study’s title, however, is something of a misnomer. She writes in her brief introduction that ‘“Hitler’s philosophers” refers to the group of thinkers surrounding Hitler before, during and after the Holocaust’. This too is misleading: under discussion here are not only prominent Nazi party members like Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, but... [read more]
Liam Sprod, Nuclear Futurism: The Work of Art in the Age of Remainderless Destruction
reviewed by Callam Green
It is reasonably safe to say that ‘end-times’ have been an obsession of every culture-producing civilisation throughout human history. The English language itself is terrified of non-ending, the sentence without a full stop signifies the boundless potentiality for language; how can a sentence mean anything when it isn’t formally ended? And ellipses? Their terror is slightly more palatable but only in the paradoxical sense of its formal signification of ending where there is plenty left... [read more]
At the centre of Emily Berry’s debut poetry collection Dear Boy is ‘Shriek’. The poem introduces a creature which recalls Ted Hughes’s’ Crow in being a thing but also not a thing, a concept personified, something to be feared as well as pitied. Berry’s Shriek is presented in a world whose elements are borrowed from fairytale; Shriek lives in a tower and the villagers have gathered to chant and taunt him. Other faux-historical details continue to pastiche the children’s story... [read more]
