Jacob Silverman

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.

“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.

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.

Recent Pubs

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.