Jacob Silverman

For The Quarterly Conversation, I wrote about Lars Iyer and his novels Spurious and Dogma. Here’s one thing I had to say:

Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men—W., a moderately successful writer and intellectual, and his layabout failure of a friend, Lars Iyer. The plots follow their delirious, often drunken, conversations about life, religion, and the end of the world (which they believe is soon approaching). They’re like two very well read David Mamet characters, skydiving without parachutes and laughing all the way down.

I talked to Adam Wilson, whose very funny debut novel, Flatscreen, is out now. You can read my profile of Wilson at Capital New York.

For The National, I reviewed Krys Lee’s short story collection, Drifting House.

I went to see Belinda McKeon and Colm Tóibín at The Center for Fiction and wrote about it for Capital New York.

Over at Bookforum, I reviewed The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

Certain writers are too weird to fully belong to their own time. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky—a Soviet writer obsessed with Kant and Shakespeare, whose own life barely rippled beyond a small coterie of Muscovite writers before his death in 1950—is among them. Krzhizhanovsky wrote philosophical works of fiction that veer between chattiness and, in the fine translations of Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov, unexpected elegance. They are tales of bodies suspended between life and death, of an animated Eiffel Tower that rampages across Europe, and of towns where dreams are made literal. To read these stories is to be buttonholed by a slightly mad but unfailingly interesting stranger desperate for a sympathetic ear. In Krzhizhanovsky, we find the aphorisms of a dime store philosopher and the polyphony of a schizophrenic.

Read the rest here.

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.

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. Our greatest political commentator is a fake conservative TV host, campaign activist, and possible presidential candidate. Our most incisive newspaper is one whose fake headlines are so bizarrely possible as to often anticipate some future eventuality. “Onion headline or real?” is practically a catchphrase now.

You can read the full article here.