Posts From Author: Book reviews

Seriously Questioning… Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy’s witty, moving, fiery new collection, So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), takes us into the past. In its longest poem, “Is There Something I Should Know?”, Shaughnessy remembers a world of Simple Minds and Duran Duran songs, where she finds a young woman haunted by the changes in her body, caught in “pubescence’s acrid synthesis”, betrayed by her own functions and the silence of others (“No one discussed it or acknowledged it / even though we ALL READ THE JUDY BLUME”). Shaughnessy’s previous work includes Our Andromeda (2012), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, The International Griffin Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award. Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker, O Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Brenda Shaughnessy will appear alongside Tony Tulathimutte, Travon Free, and Ana Marie Cox at our next Seriously Entertaining show, The End My Friend, at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on April 6. Buy tickets here. Name: Brenda Shaughnessy. Where are you from? Born in Okinawa, Japan. Raised in Southern California. What is your occupation? Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Title of most recent work: So Much Synth. What are you working on now? Mentoring our future poets. If […]
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Space Oddity

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space Janna Levin Knopf, 2016; 256pp The romance of the cosmos is the subject of Black Hole Blues. The romance of bodies of unimaginable size colliding and merging darkly and silently in space. Romance, yes — but also the knotty bureaucracy that has hampered and enabled scientists for the last five decades as they’ve grappled with one of astrophysics’ most notorious what-ifs. Might we ever hear a gravitational wave? If you’ve never even heard of a gravitational wave, then Janna Levin is here to help. Part oral history, part popular science, her brilliant book’s 250 pages shuttle by at a pace untypical of physics writing (if, that is, you’re usually bamboozled by quarks and bendy spacetime). Her friendly, NPRish tone and good eye for novelistic detail help the unschooled reader through some of physics’ most abstruse concepts. But it’s not just a light touch that leavens Levin’s writing. Her decision to focus on the more mundane forces that govern science’s arduous progress — the bureaucracy, the funding bids, the internecine squabbling — this is what gives Black Hole Blues heart where one might expect vacuum. The chilliness of space is tempered by fiery human passion. “As much as this book is a chronicle of gravitational waves,” writes Levin, […]
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Review: The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

The Sellout Paul Beatty Farrar, Straus and Giroux (hardcover) / Picador (paperback), 2015; 304pp Entering the world like the bastard love-child of a Chris Rock routine and a Thomas Pynchon novel, The Sellout is a sensational satire on race relations in the United States. Its outrageous plot, which reintroduces segregation to a forgotten ghetto in Los Angeles County, motors along in the background of a series of brilliant set-pieces fueled by taboo-busting invective. Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize triumph last month (he’s the first American author thus honored) is a richly deserved boost to the book, which will hopefully find a wide readership in the years to come as a consequence of the win. And reaching readers feels urgent: the protagonist’s contrarian position on political correctness and establishment thinking about “black America’s problems”, which leads him down a legal rabbit-hole that ends at the Supreme Court, lays the ground for a spookily timely jolt to liberal thought. Ends and means may not always line up; what seem like blasphemous methods may advance a just cause much further. How should we proceed when so little has been achieved going about things the so-called right way? Offering an answer, or at least provocatively worrying away at the question, is the submerged serious intent of Beatty’s […]
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Agnus Dei

Sweet Lamb of Heaven Lydia Millet W.W. Norton & Company, 2016; 256pp Here’s our set-up. After the birth of Anna and Ned’s child, a “ragged, uninvited disruption” enters Anna’s life: she starts to hear voices. Ned is distant — he’d not wanted to go through with the pregnancy anyway — and Anna is left alone to ponder this phenomenon. She watches a lot of horror movies, she spends her nights on Wikipedia. All the time, she’s beset by a “torrent of sound and image”, a “stream of convolved murmurings”. During this period, Ned becomes increasingly remote — he’s unfaithful, and his interest in entering Alaskan politics grows. Then one day, the voices stop. Anna takes Lena, their daughter, and abandons Ned. They travel the country, evading Ned’s attempts to reach them, and eventually wind up living in a motel atop a cliff in Maine, some two hours’ drive from Portland. There, Anna and Lena (now six) get to know Don, the motel’s proprietor, and his other guests, each of whom has also heard voices. “If I had been guided to the motel by some sense beyond the usual five,” she writes, “some navigational instinct having to do with magnetism or light, I wanted to know […]
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“Oh Beauty, You Are the Light of the World!”

The Light of the World: A Memoir Elizabeth Alexander Grand Central Publishing, 2015; 240pp Elizabeth Alexander‘s lovely, sad memoir is a tale of two thunderbolts. The first: love at first sight — “A torque inside my stomach, the science of love” — between Alexander and her husband-to-be, the Eritrean artist Ficre Ghebreyesus. The second: Ficre’s sudden death, at the age of fifty, at their home in Connecticut. Alexander’s passage through grief to life on the other side is at once harrowing and hopeful: while her writing eloquently captures the essential terror of death, it also shows how life and literature might be talismans against despair. It’s a book that will stop you in your tracks. Its fragmentary genesis and structure, which Alexander writes about in an afterword, surely reflect the haphazardness of grief, the slow shape-taking of the narratives we create to make sense of what happens to us. “The story seems to begin with catastrophe,” she writes, “but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story.” Of course, giving literary shape to life may indeed lend a love story a tragic arc, and so it is here that small details and shared experiences — little regrets, the three dozen […]
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The Eye of the Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking Colum McCann Random House, 2015; 256pp The first words we read in Colum McCann’s 2015 collection of stories are Wallace Stevens’s: “Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” provides the epigraphs for each of the short chapters in McCann’s title story, and an oblique way in to understanding its philosophical intricacies. Its haiku-like fragments dictate the reader’s focus in ways that are continually refreshing and unexpected: “The river is moving,” he writes; “The blackbird must be flying.” “When the blackbird flew out of sight / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.” In the same way that Stevens’s blackbird is often just glimpsed, the tiniest of details in the vastness of nature, so McCann draws attention to the poetic detail at the edge of the frame, the impulse or act that might hold the key to explaining a significant event. The event in question is the apparently random murder of an 82-year-old judge yards from his home on the Upper East Side. The story, suspended between the judge’s interior life and the geometry of his murder, captured obliquely […]
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On Face Value

The Face: Cartography of the Void Chris Abani Restless Books, 2016; 96pp What do our faces say about us — and how much of what they say is fair? That’s one of the questions posed by Restless Books’s intriguing new series The Face, in which writers use their own countenances as launchpads into the imaginative stratosphere. We are promised “unique perspectives on race, culture, identity, and the human experience”, and in Chris Abani‘s Cartography of the Void, part of the series’s inaugural triptych (along with short works by Ruth Ozeki and Tash Aw), we’re not disappointed. Abani is the son of an English mother and an Igbo father, and was raised in Afikpo, Nigeria. Put another way: “Biologically my face is a mix of two races, of two cultures, of two lineages.” On one side, there’s the Celt or Anglo-Saxon influence of the matrilineal line; on the other, the Egu and Ehugbo influence passed through his father. Like many people of mixed-race origin, Abani often experiences feelings of alienation depending on where he is. He’s “firmly black, of unknown origin” to Westerners, yet “not entirely African” to people in Nigeria. Everywhere he travels, he is the Other that fits: “In New Zealand I was assumed to be […]
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Amerika the Beautiful

Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence Bryan Burrough Penguin, 2015; 608pp “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” — John Jacobs of Weatherman  “The challenge for me… is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem as insane then as it does now.” — Bryan Burrough Five hundred pages into Bryan Burrough‘s engrossing account of America’s recent radical past, we encounter one of his revolutionary subjects standing alone in the shower saying his own name, over and over, “to remind himself who he really was”. It may have been because Raymond Luc Levasseur, who led the United Freedom Front, had amassed so many aliases (more than a dozen) that his memory was in genuine need of a jogging. But the moment also feels touched by wider existential concerns. Time and again, veterans of the radical underground, many of whose stories are told in Burrough’s book for the first time, describe the miasma of collective madness that took hold of them and convinced them of the need to blow up buildings, rob banks, and murder police officers. There are some shocking moments, when theory […]
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The Eyes Have It: The Danish Girl as Book and Movie

The Danish Girl David Ebershoff Penguin, 2015 (originally published 2000); 304pp The Danish Girl Directed by Tom Hooper UK/US/Belgium, 2015; 119 minutes The eyes have it. In the recent, Academy Award-winning film version of The Danish Girl, Eddie Redmayne’s dazzled, oceanic gaze — coyly averted, abruptly direct — tells a whole story of its own. As Lili, the real-life female alter ego of artist Einar Wegener, he’s unable to look Ben Whishaw’s Henrik in the face for fear of being revealed; with his wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), he can say more with a discreet eye-roll or quiver than he can with words. His eyes have an overflowing, revelatory, vulnerable quality — at times it’s like he’s naked. Redmayne, it would seem, has read David Ebershoff‘s novel very closely. First published in 2000, The Danish Girl has deservedly become a classic of trans literature for the sensitivity and perspicuity of its treatment. Although he doesn’t shy from the anatomical realities of the trans experience, Ebershoff’s greatest contribution to the genre is his depiction of Einar’s interior life. And from the very first chapter, Einar seeks respite from the difficulty of being behind his eyelids. Greta (as she’s known in the book) has asked him to put on a pair of women’s […]
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