February 2012
3 posts
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In Tablet, I wrote about why Michael Chabon’s growing success as a screenwriter—he co-write “John Carter,” which Disney will release next month—may be bad news for fans of his fiction.
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The circuitous return of Steven Van Zandt, wise... →
For Capital New York, I reviewed “Lilyhammer,” the first original series from Netflix.
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For The Daily Beast, I talked to Alex Gilvarry about his novel From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. I was really taken by the way in which books like this—a satire of both the fashion industry and the post-9/11 security state—manage to lampoon and almost anticipate our reality.
Ours is now a culture that overflows with the absurd, to the point where it substitutes for reality....
January 2012
3 posts
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Sunday Saddam
Today Vol. 1 Brooklyn published my short story, “Being a Dictator Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.”
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"Guantanamo Bay represents a legacy of shame for...
Last week, The National published my essay on Jonathan Hansen’s book, “Guantanamo: An American History.” I’m surprised that this book hasn’t gotten more attention in the US; it’s really worth your time.
If you want to understand Guantánamo in the age of the War on Terror, you need to understand it in the age of Clinton and Bush Senior. In the early 1990s, the...
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For The Daily Beast, I reviewed Best European Fiction 2012, the latest in Dalkey’s series of annual anthologies.
Over at Tablet, I wrote about the end of Bored to Death:
There hasn’t been a good television show about New York Jewish life since Seinfeld, whose final episode aired in 1998. The latest program to attempt an honest and funny depiction of the shtetl that is Gotham, the...
December 2011
1 post
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My review of Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die recently appeared on Bookforum’s site.
And today, Tablet published my essay on Roberto Bolaño and his use of Nazis in much of his fiction.
November 2011
1 post
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photo by dagnyg
My short story, “Clearing,” was published today in Spork Press. It’s about a town slowly disappearing.
My ex-husband, Michael, was one of the first to go. He visited in early March. I wished him well — we had been on good terms for some time, but actually, we had never quite been on bad terms, and maybe that was the problem: we could never get excited...
October 2011
8 posts
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Arthur Phillips The Tragedy of Arthur is being published in the UK, so I reviewed it for The National.
Whether it’s the mysterious Arabic manuscript undergirding Don Quixote or the autobiography at the heart of Robinson Crusoe, novels have long relied on “false documents” - elaborately conceived texts that, by claiming to be factual, boost a novel’s sense of realism, of...
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Over at The New Republic’s The Book, I wrote about Horacio Castellanos Moya and his WWII novel Tyrant Memory.
At Tablet, I reported on an appearance by the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and I wrote an essay about the brilliant, complicated, mostly forgotten father of the 1960s New Left, Paul Goodman, about whom there’s a documentary being released. It’s worth seeing.
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At the 92YTribeca, Myla Goldberg headlined a night of writers reading while a jazz band accompanied them. Highlights included Goldberg’s rendition of “Maryland, My Maryland” and Chris Weingarten’s story about a bestial Ministry roadie. I wrote it up for Tablet.
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For the Christian Science Monitor, I reported about the state of streaming music services and the effects on terrestrial radio. The article ran today online and should be in the latest print edition.
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Recent Pubs
In The Daily Beast, a review of Jacques Strauss’ novel The Dubious Salvation of Jack V.
In Tablet, an article about Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s history of criminality.
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, a review of Imre Kertész’s Fiasco, along with some thoughts on namelessness in Holocaust fiction.
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“In American literature and movies, the reigning Jew is still the meek scholar or...”
– The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
September 2011
1 post
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Over at The National, I reviewed Manan Ahmed’s book Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination. If you haven’t read Chapati Mystery, Ahmed’s blog and the source of much of this book, I recommend it. CM is one of a number of blogs — Registan, zunguzungu, Juan Cole — from academics and policy types that I’ve found really accessible and...
August 2011
2 posts
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Kill Your Darlings
For The National, I reviewed the first novel by Amit Majmudar, who is also a very talented and widely published poet. There’s a lot to like about Majmudar’s writing, but he fails to follow through on the rending climax he’s built up to, which makes the ultimate ending kind of treacly. Still, a writer to look out for. You can read the review here.
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Fiction at Storychord
My short story, “Rose Garden,” was chosen for the latest issue of Storychord. This is doubly exciting for me, as I’m a fan of Storychord (which twice a month publishes a story, an image, and a one-song soundtrack by “underexposed talent”) and because “Rose Garden” is my first published story. Here’s a sample:
Walking to my car, parked at the curb,...
July 2011
3 posts
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On Thursday, Tablet published my essay about why superhero movies are awful and how to save them. It begins:
Pity the comic-book fan who, with plucky optimism, skips to the movie theater to see one of this summer’s superhero flicks, only to leave two-and-a-half hours later with a CGI-induced hangover. Green Lantern was a travesty—you could feel the producers looming just off-camera, pleading...
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Sgt James Goes to Abottabad
Critics have a disruptive habit of adding context when we’d sometimes prefer to have none. When I saw The Hurt Locker in 2009, my initial reaction was that it was a fantastic film, unshakably intense and suspenseful, craftily shot, well acted (particularly Jeremy Renner’s madcap grittiness). It was easily the best movie I’d seen so far that year. But around Oscar time, I was...
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Over at The Daily Beast, I wrote about Jesse Ball and reviewed his new novel, The Curfew. I think this is his best novel, but I also think there was a faddish irrational exuberance around his first two books, which could be charming but also too oblique, deliberately confusing in a way that didn’t serve the books very well. But I like the direction he’s going in, telling real...
June 2011
4 posts
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For the Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote about Mathias Enard’s Zone, an immensely ambitious one-sentence, 517-page novel about violence, obsession, and despair over centuries in the Mediterranean conflict “zone.” The review is on LARB’s temporary site; the full site will be launching later this year (summer?).
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David Denby, recently:
Discussing Tree of Life, June 23: “a movie that is about everything can’t be about anything in particular.”
Discussing summer blockbusters, June 27: “When everything is at stake, nothing is at stake.”
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For The Atlantic, I wrote about the documentary Just Like Us, which follows some comedians as they tour the Middle East. My piece begins:
As part of his act, the Egyptian-American actor and comedian Ahmed Ahmed likes to tell a joke about how, via Google and no-fly lists, he discovered a terrorist who shares his name. He imagines the terrorist walking around some Middle Eastern country, where...
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For The Daily Beast, I wrote about Vladimir Sorokin. This spring, two of his books appeared in English translation, Day of the Oprichnik and the 700-page Ice Trilogy, which I called ”an alternative vision of the universe, from Earth’s formation to its eventual end.” He’s a bizarre and deeply imaginative writer. Ice is not for everyone, but Day of the Oprichnik provides a...
May 2011
1 post
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The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced...
This weekend The National published my review of Sophie Hardach’s first novel. While not a great novel (although it is an enjoyable, sometimes moving read), I did think that Hardach was quite good at exploring some of the less heralded changes wrought by the post-9/11 security state:
In the past decade, we’ve become inured to particular kinds of story that are products of the...
April 2011
3 posts
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Over at ZYZZYVA, I wrote about Deb Olin Unferth’s memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love And Went To Join The War, and laid out some thoughts on memoirs in general, a genre that I often have problems with, at least as it’s often practiced today. (This is my second piece for ZYZZYVA’s new blog; previously I wrote about David Bezmozgis’ novel, The Free World, which is a...
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The Jews of Gathundia: A Photo Slideshow
Below is a slideshow of some of my photos that didn’t make it into my article that ran in Tablet last week. Click a photo to see a slightly larger version.
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Today Tablet published my story on the Jews of Gathundia, a small village in rural Kenya. Tomorrow I’ll post some photos that didn’t make it into the story.
March 2011
3 posts
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New review: Mirza Waheed's "The Collaborator" →
February 2011
1 post
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New review: Ismail Kadare and "The Accident" →
January 2011
3 posts
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New review: Dezso Kosztolányi →
For The National. Kosztolányi’s worth checking out — a writer with a great comic sense who was passionately apolitical in a time of political extremism. (I hope to get to his Anna Edes sometime. I’ve heard good things.) Though I liked Skylark quite a bit, I didn’t find it to be “perfect” as Deborah Eisenberg did. But it’s a poignant, funny, and gracefully...
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New review: Rachel Polonsky's "Molotov's Magic... →
Over at The Daily Beast. Probably would appeal to fans of Elif Batuman or Ian Frazier’s books.
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Kenya Journal: Ali and Ali of Lamu
On first meeting, Ali Samosa sounds like a Swahili Ron Burgundy. “I’m famous,” he says. “I am very well known here.” He adds, with a proud grin, “You can read about me in Lonely Planet.”
Ali is a restaurateur, who serves lunch and dinner, by appointment, at his home in Shela village, on Lamu Island, Kenya. His wife does the cooking, but Ali is the...
December 2010
1 post
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“those generals who fought against Islamic terrorism by conscientiously rubbing...”
– Zone by Mathias Énard
November 2010
2 posts
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New review: Orly Castel-Bloom's "Dolly City" →
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October 2010
7 posts
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Voices of the People →
In The National, I wrote about “Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East,” a new anthology put together by Words Without Borders and Reza Aslan. WWB has put together several anthologies that are far more sophisticated and more thought out than most. I recommend this one.
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“Long perceived as stagnant by Western commentators, victims of misguided...”
– Pankaj Mishra, once again knocking it out of the park
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White Russians
There’s a certain type of essay in which a writer uses the occasion of the release of a book (or film or study or whatever else) to essentially write about whatever he or she wants that is tangentially related to the subject. This isn’t always a bad thing; the New York Review of Books often has this kind of writing, and it’s generally good and interesting. But it can also be...
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Salvaging "Boardwalk Empire"
I’ve been trying to figure out what my problem with “Boardwalk Empire” is; I think I’ve got it. It’s not the casting of Steve Buscemi as all-powerful city treasurer Nucky Thompson, as some of my friends have complained. Buscemi doesn’t have the swagger or presence of other gangster-types (including those on the show), but he ably fulfills the role of an...
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My Review Of (And Some Notes On) David Grossman's...
By now, most literary types have read news coverage of what happened at VQR, so I won’t rehash that here. (I also never worked in the VQR offices—I blogged from my perch here in LA—so I don’t have anything to add.) But it looks like the magazine’s shutdown means that the Fall 2010 issue won’t appear online. If so, this is a shame, because what I’ve seen...
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September 2010
6 posts
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“The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never...”
– Czesław Miłosz
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A Binary Assessment of the New Yorker 20 Under 40...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, “Birdsong”: 1
Chris Adrian, “The Warm Fuzzies”: 0
Daniel Alarcón, “Second Lives”: 0
David Bezmozgis, “The Train of Their Departure”: 1
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, “The Erlking”: 0
Joshua Ferris, “The Plot”: 1
Jonathan Safran Foer, “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly”: 0
Nell Freudenberger,...
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“I shall doze a little,” the monarch said, and when the viziers told him...”
– Elegy for Kosovo by Ismail Kadare