Jacob Silverman

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.

Sunday Saddam

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”

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 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 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. 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.