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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
Quiet Desperation
A review by Andrei Lankov
There is no shortage of books on North Korea. Thanks to its nuclear ambitions, it attracts a surprising amount of attention for a country whose population and economy are roughly the same size as Ghana's. But little is said about average North Koreans. They come across as faceless people who obediently follow the orders of their Dear Leader, as Kim Jong Il is officially known, and his opaque inner circle. Nothing to Envy, by journalist Barbara Demick, rounds out the picture. Working in Seoul and Beijing as a Los Angeles Times correspondent, she interviewed numerous people who had fled North...
Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich
Scenes From a Marriage
A review by Diana Postlethwaite
Louise Erdrich has crafted a harrowing novel of fire and ice, with love and violence, exhilaration and terror, and the warm security of family rituals alternating unpredictably with chilling outbursts of emotional and physical violence. Shadow Tag's form and content make for disturbing polarities: Erdrich imposes her exquisite mastery of language, imagery and literary form upon the raw and brutal chaos of mental illness, alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Unlike the rich orchestrations of much of her previous fiction, with its expansive explorations of history, storytelling and social...
The Collected Stories by Leonard Michaels
The Irresponsibility of Feelings: Reading Leonard Michaels
A review by Wyatt Mason
During the summer of 2001, a New York editor asked me which contemporary American writer I most admired. I replied, "Leonard Michaels." After a pause, he posed another question, albeit one that already contained its answer: "Hasn't his star fallen?" Initially struck by what I saw as the coldness of the remark, I would have been foolish to maintain that this editor had been anything other than correct. After all, when Michaels's first three books appeared, they launched his reputation as one of his generation's most gifted writers. His first book, Going Places (1969), a collection of...
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Azorno by Inger Christensen
Pictures Remembering Creatures
A review by Douglas Messerli
The death of Inger Christensen in January of this year has left us without one of our greatest celebrants of living and life. For that reason it is bittersweet to have her poetic 1967 fiction Azorno finally translated into English. As with most of Christensen's writings, Azorno is a highly structured work. In this case, seven characters -- two men and five pregnant women -- are in the process of writing fictions. Each of their narratives contains similar actions, phrases, and events, although one would be hard placed to describe any of them as having a plot. Various of these figures write...
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The World's Best-Written Soap Opera
A review by Doug Brown
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Thus begins Tolstoy's classic tale of two extended families. I am not a fan of soap opera/romance as a genre, and the concept of reading an 800-page one only crossed my mind due to my classics year project. I knew I wanted to get some Tolstoy under my cultural belt, and when the choice came down to Anna Karenina vs. War and Peace, 800 pages won out over 1,200 pages. Yes, I'm that shallow. But speaking as someone who would rather stare at a blank wall than watch a soap opera, Anna Karenina is a really, really...
The Unnamed Signed Edition by Joshua Ferris
Forced To Walk by an 'Unnamed' Disease
A review by April Henry
Joshua Ferris' second novel, The Unnamed, concerns Tim Farnsworth, a partner in a big Manhattan law firm. He and his wife, Jane, have a beautiful house and a sullen teenager, Becka, and call each other "banana." There's only one problem in Tim's life, but it's all-consuming. Twice before he's been stricken with a mysterious, uncontrollable illness (the "unnamed" of the title) that forces him to walk until he collapses. Jane has collected him from fields, benches and the back of a barbershop. Doctors are baffled, unsure if it's mental or physical. He's been written up in the New England...
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