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There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Sometimes a Small Redemption
A review by Alexandra Schwartz
"Russian literature has been a kind of religion in this country -- a religion based on the moral position of writers, on their suffering," Ludmilla Petrushevskaya once told Sally Laird, her British translator. "All our greatest writers have been sufferers and saints." It was May 1987, and Immortal Love, Petrushevskaya's first collection of short stories, would be published the following year, just in time for her fiftieth birthday. If suffering really could be considered a legitimate qualification for literary greatness, Petrushevskaya had more than earned her due. A year after she was born...
Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers by Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce's Write it Right
A review by Elizabeth Bachner
With Ambrose Bierce, it's like you're either against him or you're against him. Even if you love his long-curdled, tireless bitchiness -- even if it validates you and vindicates you and just plain makes you feel better -- you know that if he met you at a party or read your short story in Harper's or The New Yorker, he would shrivel you and skewer you and make you sorry you'd ever tried to share his space on the planet. Meanwhile, Bierce's own life seems to have been a bitter, strife-filled stew of self-fulfilling prophecy. His 1909 usage guide, Write It Right, shows that he had an...
Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi
Something to Tell You
A review by John Leonard
Jamal Khan, the analyst-hero of Hanif Kureishi's wonderful new novel, Something to Tell You (Scribner, $17), asks most of the important questions in the very first paragraph of this satiric romp through a midlife crisis and swinging twenty-first century London. As in every analytic confrontation, the stranger inside must open his mouth to ask "why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away." Why, in addition, "are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is...
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Invisible by Paul Auster
Lies Worth Telling
A review by Vincent Rossmeier
Behind any artist's urge to create is an egotistical impulse -- a desire to be remembered, to see one's works immortalized. Writers attempt to defy death by achieving eternal life on the page and in the imaginations of readers. Such hopes are ultimately illusory: obviously, a page or a book or a computer file may outlast their creators, but nothing has the stamina to outlast time. Yet few writers are either willing or courageous enough to confront the fact that literary immortality is essentially impossible. Paul Auster is an exception. In works like The New York Trilogy, In the Country of ...
Heart of Darkness/The Congo Diary (Penguin Classics) by Joseph Conrad
Apocalypse Then
A review by Doug Brown
The only film I ever faked an ID to get into was Apocalypse Now. I spent half an hour in a social sciences class (ah, the irony) carefully altering the birth year on my learner's permit. That evening, a couple of friends and I went and beheld the spectacle. I recall thinking it was a really weird movie; it wasn't until my second or third viewing in college that I finally started to grok it in fullness. Of course, I had heard it was based on Heart of Darkness, but even as the film grew to become one of my favorites I never bothered to pick up Conrad. Given how the film is such a portrayal of...
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
Pure Pop Music Pleasure from Nick Hornby
A review by Mark Lindquist
Back in the mid-1990s I was a big fan of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, a novel about a young man's devotion to music. My girlfriend questioned my enthusiasm for this book, which she considered "middlebrow" at best, and our disagreement over the quality of the writing resulted in a drawn-out argument. "Listen to us," I finally said, "this is my proof." "What?" "This fight sounds exactly like a scene from his book." This observation did not end our argument well, or even end it at all. I stood by the sentiment, insisting that Hornby wrote spot-on dialogue and got into the head of...
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