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Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Erik Larson Crown Publishing, 2015; 448pp In six heart-stopping pages in the middle of Dead Wake, Erik Larson appears to suspend time in order to watch the deadly torpedo launched from German submarine U-20 shoot through the sea toward the doomed ocean liner Lusitania. In fact, the torpedo was only […]
Read MoreWinter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped Garry Kasparov PublicAffairs, 2015; 320pp “Garry Kasparov, Russian human rights activist and former world chess champion” is how the author of this new and ferocious critique of the Putin regime would like to be introduced. Certainly not “Garry Kasparov, […]
Read MoreA Decent Ride Irvine Welsh Doubleday, 2016; 368pp “Drivin a taxi is the best joab ah’ve hud in ma puff,” remarks “Juice” Terry Lawson early on in Irvine Welsh‘s new novel, A Decent Ride. But this is not an ode to honest labor: “It’s best in August,” he continues, “wi aw the snobby tourist rides […]
Read MoreSell/Buy/Date Written and performed by Sarah Jones Directed by Carolyn Cantor Playing at New York Live Arts until January 16 Note: This article concerns the workshop production of Sell/Buy/Date staged in New York in January 2016 A woman with a barcode tattooed on her ass. That was the image that stuck with me after Sarah Jones […]
Read MoreTwo Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Salman Rushdie Random House, 2015; 304pp Salman Rushdie‘s twelfth novel is a New Yorker’s Arabian Nights, a wryly witty, promiscuously intertextual work that offers delirious pleasures and fantastical beings in equal measure. Our world — New York in the present day — has been beset by “strangenesses”. A gardener […]
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