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.

Sunday Saddam

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

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.

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 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.