Tom Burns, Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry
reviewed by Luke Brunning
Oncologists are rarely derided. Hospital wards are rarely shadowed by the taint of the discipline’s gamut of spurious interventions, mistakes, and oddities. Similarly, we seldom interrogate the motivations of orthopaedic surgeons. Nor do crowds gather on the streets to protest under the banners of the ‘anti-obstetrics’ movement.
Psychiatry, on the other hand, remains a source of fear, suspicion, and hostility – not to mention a source of colourful reformist advocates like the... [read more]
For a start, the title of Sam Lipsyte’s new short fiction collection, The Fun Parts, niggled me throughout a first reading. All fun? Surely not?
Like most of the male protagonists in these thirteen stories – and even when given ladybits and called Tovah, as in ‘The Climber Room’, they are men – Mr Lipsyte seems to have had a troubled history, especially publishing wise. One of his novels, he claims, was rejected 30 times. Now, though, he’s been lionised as the new Joseph Heller,... [read more]
In 2009 Tao Lin told Michael Silverblatt, ‘I want to do the purest form of a certain style.’ They were discussing his recently published novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, but the purity of style he described to Silverblatt has found full manifestation in Taipei, published this June. Taipei is Tao Lin’s third novel. After publishing two novels (Eeeee Eee Eeee and Richard Yates), a short story collection (Bed), two collections of poetry (you are a little bit happier than i am and... [read more]
Slavoj Žižek (ed.), The Idea of Communism 2: The New York Conference
reviewed by Luke Davies
Alain Badiou's contribution to this collection of papers (from a 2011 New York conference entitled, 'Communism: A New Beginning') straight away deals with the difficult subject of communism's shady past. Writing on its relation with terror, he argues for the need of a new 'historical sequence' in which 'the absolute necessity for the communist Idea in opposition to the unbounded barbarism of capitalism' can be realised alongside an acceptance of 'the undeniably terroristic nature of the... [read more]
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]
