January 2010
6 posts
Kafka's Last Friend
“Everyone wants to reach an advanced age, but to be elderly is actually to be sick all the time. The body can no longer resist disease.”
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“They lived for the music. It was like food to them.”
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“And I still watch my son play, on television. He lives on. Sometimes I think it will be possible someday to postpone death through technology.”
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VQR Winter Issue
The North Africa-themed Winter issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review is now available. I’m biased, of course, but I think there’s plenty to like here, with pieces on nation-building in Sudan, Somali jihadists from Minnesota, West Africa’s “Cocaine Coast,” a blind Moroccan plumber, Mali’s threatened elephants, and much more, including fiction by Leila...
In Sunday LAT
My review of Tash Aw’s second novel, Map of the Invisible World, appears in the Los Angeles Times this Sunday (1/10). Check it out here.
This is a serious obituary. →
25 Years of "White Noise"
In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, Richard Rayner had a nice appreciation of Don DeLillo’s landmark novel (including a remark about why “landmark” or “masterpiece” status can be burdensome, particularly for a work that is often breezily funny). Rayner, in particular, cites the aphoristic nature of much of DeLillo’s dialogue, picking out these examples:
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