Jacob Silverman

In Tablet, I wrote about why Michael Chabon’s growing success as a screenwriter—he...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:28:45 -0800

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.

The circuitous return of Steven Van Zandt, wise guy (via Netflix, and Norwegian comedy) | Capital New York

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:01:00 -0800

The circuitous return of Steven Van Zandt, wise guy (via Netflix, and Norwegian comedy) | Capital New York:

For Capital New York, I reviewed “Lilyhammer,” the first original series from Netflix.

For The Daily Beast, I talked to Alex Gilvarry about his novel From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:46:50 -0800

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.

Sunday Saddam

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:23:55 -0800

Today Vol. 1 Brooklyn published my short story, “Being a Dictator Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.”

"Guantanamo Bay represents a legacy of shame for US"

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:56:11 -0800

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 American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, became home to thousands of refugees fleeing from Haiti. Parts of the base were converted to refugee camps, where Haitians lived in squalor, and awaited permission to emigrate to the United States. The problem only got worse when several hundred refugees tested positive for HIV. At the time, federal law prevented anyone with the virus from moving to the US.

Read the rest here.

For The Daily Beast, I reviewed Best European Fiction 2012, the latest in Dalkey’s series of...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:41:58 -0800

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 novelist Jonathan Ames’ Bored to Death, was recently cancelledby HBO following the conclusion of its third season. Artistically, this was the right call.

My review of Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die recently appeared on Bookforum’s...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:48:01 -0800

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.

photo by dagnyg My short story, “Clearing,” was published today in Spork Press....

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:22:00 -0800

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 enough to argue or, even briefly, to hate each other.

He had sold most of his things, and the rest lay in boxes in the bed of his truck, which looked as if packed for a delivery: well arranged and closely grouped cardboard cubes, with blue vinyl straps arcing across to keep them, like a mental patient, bound to the bed. I knew he had money problems, that a man had come by and made a decent offer on his house. Michael was wearing one of his work shirts, a stretched piece of fabric marked by a kaleidoscope of paint spatters and a few holes revealing tanned skin. Periodically he rubbed one hand across another, kneaded it — an old gesture, part of the body’s autonomous self. His hands still looked thick and dry, the knuckle-skin scraped down.

Read the rest here.

Arthur Phillips The Tragedy of Arthur is being published in the UK, so I reviewed it for The...

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:11:32 -0700

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 being a credible world unto itself. These writers worked hard to create a sense of authenticity around their false documents, writing introductions or commentaries that painted themselves as humble custodians of the found text. The technique could also be useful for disassociating an author from a book’s political content, as Voltaire did by claiming that Candide was translated from the work of a “Dr Ralph”.

You can read the rest here.

Over at The New Republic’s The Book, I wrote about Horacio Castellanos Moya and his WWII novel...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:54:00 -0700

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.

“On television… political leaders need not trouble...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:34:43 -0700

“On television… political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude.”
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

I took some photos yesterday at Occupy Wall Street. You can find...

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:16:16 -0700

I took some photos yesterday at Occupy Wall Street. You can find them here.

At the 92YTribeca, Myla Goldberg headlined a night of writers reading while a jazz band accompanied...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:46:15 -0700

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.

For the Christian Science Monitor, I reported about the state of streaming music services and the...

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:10:40 -0700

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.

Recent Pubs

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:31:06 -0700

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.

"In American literature and movies, the reigning Jew is still the meek scholar or the mild family..."

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 08:43:48 -0700

“In American literature and movies, the reigning Jew is still the meek scholar or the mild family man, although I’ve lately noticed a growing cinematic population of tough Jews, surprising hero soldiers, rebels, kickers of Nazis ass, the occasional gangster. But the Anglophilic, artsy, bohemian Jew is a rarer bird, assimilating into the Gentile world not from any desire to blend in but because he is too florid to prune himself to fit available Jewish types. This, somewhat, was my father: not bookish, as Jews in his day were meant to be, but flamboyantly literary. Not self-hating, but self-creating. Not interested in himself as a Jew at all, but by no means interested in anonymity.”

- The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips

Over at The National, I reviewed Manan Ahmed’s book Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and...

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 08:50:35 -0700

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 have helped bring their authors into more mainstream publications (e.g. Registan’s Joshua Foust now writes for The Atlantic). Worth checking all of ‘em out.

Kill Your Darlings

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:18:36 -0700

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.

Fiction at Storychord

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:24:54 -0700

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, I see something in the street. Moving closer, it becomes a squirrel, gently laid out in the road, its fur a faint tortoiseshell pattern and appearing varnished in the afternoon light. Around its head is a puddle of rich pink blood, like melted lipstick, and the squirrel’s small tongue extends out of its mouth as if reaching for a taste. The creature doesn’t have the flattened aspect of roadkill; it looks like the victim of something precise: a miniature person has taken his bat to the animal’s head, mugged it and run off with its wallet. It’s some kind of crime, and I stand there for a few minutes, swaying, daydreaming about calling 911 and waiting for the sirens, for people to leave their houses and come into the streets to leer and gossip.

You can find the rest here.

On Thursday, Tablet published my essay about why superhero movies are awful and how to save them. It...

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:22:46 -0700

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 with whatever fallen deities they pray to that this overdone stew of a movie would earn enough money to enable a franchise. Thor had moments of levity, and its star, Chris Hemsworth, appears to know his way around a Shake Weight, but the title character and his brother Loki seemed more like cosseted brats than Norse immortals locked in fratricidal conflict. Captain America, which will be released this Friday, is directed by Joe Johnston, a man who would probably rather forget the aughts (when he brought us Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo, and The Wolfman), and stars an actor, Chris Evans, whose best performance—by far—was a 10-minute cameo as an imbecilic action star in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Need we even bother?

The rest is here.