The Missing
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyJoyce Carol Oates’s vast oeuvre draws extensively on 20th-century American history. This, her 51st novel, unflinchingly portrays the human impact, on both soldiers and civilians, of the war in Iraq. Carthage (not the ancient city, but the small town outside New York) begins with a desperate search for Cressida Mayfield. The difficult, ethereal, Escher-obsessed 19-year-old […]
Aftershocks
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThe Free, Willy Vlautin’s fourth novel, begins with a failed suicide attempt. Leroy Kervin, an Iraq veteran whose mind was ‘caved in by war’ seven years ago, suddenly regains mental clarity and opts for a permanent way out. He is discovered by Freddie, the night watchman at his care home, and subsequently looked after in […]
Johnsey Alone
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyJohnsey Cunliffe is a young Tipperary man with a disability that has rendered him somewhat lumbering and, in everyone’s estimation (including his own), simple. Despite this, the third-person narrative voice casually slips into Johnsey’s thoughts and argot, and in doing so raises a question about whether he really is simple or merely naive and unable […]
Papa and His Girls
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyNaomi Wood’s second novel has taken an entirely different direction from her first, The Godless Boys, which explored religious and atheist extremism in an alternative-reality England of the 1980s. Mrs Hemingway tells the story of Ernest Hemingway’s four marriages, allotting sections in sequence to Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh. Though all […]
Will’s War
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIn a photograph publicising Granta’s list of the best young British novelists in 2013, Adam Foulds stood out as the only author wearing a suit and tie. Against the swath of colour displayed by the other writers, he cut an austere, faintly T S Eliot-ish figure in a dark navy suit. Foulds’s prose possesses a […]
To the Ends of the Earth
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyWeimarana
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThe rediscovery of Hans Fallada in the English-speaking world provides an intriguing case study of retrospective canon formation. After a troubled, unsettled life shaped in turns by morphine, alcohol, prison, suicide attempts and sheer bad luck, Rudolf Ditzen (Hans Fallada was a pen name taken from the Brothers Grimm) died in obscurity in 1947. While […]
Here, There & Everywhere
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyA dozen or so years ago a reviewer compared the French edition of my novel Shadows of Empire to one by Michel Déon, Les Poneys Sauvages. Naturally I read it and was happy to find it very good indeed. I said as much to my French niece, who replied, ‘Yes, Déon’s excellent, but you really must […]
Reds in Bed
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThe New York borough of Queens is home to one of the 20th century’s more distinctive ruins, the site of the 1939–40 and 1964–5 World’s Fairs at Flushing Meadow. Not much of either event remains – some wide, optimistic boulevards, a skeletal globe (the ‘Unisphere’), a science pavilion, now a museum. A geodesic dome by […]
When Harry Met Mamoon
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyWhat with the screenwriting and the creative-writing professorships, Hanif Kureishi’s career as a writer of fiction has rather stalled of late. Beyond his psychiatrist’s-couch novel, Something to Tell You (2008), the attentive reader would have to go all the way back to the 2002 short-story collection, The Body, for evidence of any sustained commitment to […]
Freedom of Expression in Russia
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIn December Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (LR, November 2012), members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, were released from prison in an amnesty. But as President Vladimir Putin made clear at a press conference: This is not a revision of the court ruling by any means … The amnesty has nothing to do […]
Yugonostalgia
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIn Pula, an Italianate harbour town in northern Croatia, I found James Joyce seated on a terrace beside a ruined Roman arch. The bronze is outside Uliks (‘Ulysses’), a little Art Nouveau cafe in what was once the Berlitz school. The 22-year-old spent five months teaching English there to Austro-Hungarian naval officers in 1904–5, living […]
The Sumpsons
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyOne day in August 2005 two fans of The Simpsons were invited along to a read-through of a forthcoming episode. Maths professors Sarah Greenwald and Andrew Nestler enjoyed things well enough, but the show’s writers weren’t altogether happy with their script. Good though the baseball-centred ‘Marge and Homer Turn a Couple Play’ was, it didn’t […]
Our Friends in the North
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyOn 18 September, people eligible and registered to vote in Scotland (including 16- and 17-year-olds) will be asked ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ This year’s independence referendum provides the impetus for these two books. In both cases, the writers have had to scrutinise the past in order to contextualise the present. This means that […]
This Dissected Isle
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThe British Studies seminar at the University of Texas has been running for nearly forty years, and this is the eighth collection of lectures given to it. Since recycling is all the rage, some of the contents of this volume may be familiar to readers of various literary periodicals in which they have appeared as […]
But Is It a Colour?
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyAlthough there have not so far been quite enough publications to establish ‘books on colour’ as a full-blown literary genre, there is no longer much sense of novelty about such essays. Alexander Theroux’s delightful and idiosyncratic studies The Primary Colors and The Secondary Colors are probably the best of the titles to tackle the full […]
Risky Business
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyI recently played the strategy board game Risk for the first time in many years. After the first desultory moves I informed my companions that from then on I was going to use Clausewitz as my guide, hoping they might be intimidated. I was the first to be knocked out. If there is one lesson from […]
An Elephant Never Forgotten
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyJumbo, the African elephant, was a Victorian celebrity. John Sutherland has not attempted to write Jumbo’s biography, nor to supersede previous biographies. Instead he aims at what he calls a ‘kind of fantasia’, or an ‘elephantasia’, an approach that is ‘more free-ranging’ and ‘egotistical’.
Hell is Other Peoples
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIt may be mere coincidence that the author of Racisms bears the same surname as the Norman knight Jean de Béthencourt, the first European to make colonial conquests in the Atlantic. The earlier Béthencourt set out in 1402 to subdue the Canary Islands – known in the parlance of the conquerors as ‘The Fortunate Isles’, […]
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Are iPhones ruining children's lives? A prominent American psychologist thinks so.
@tiffanyjenkins is not so sure:
Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
Tiffany Jenkins: The Smartphone Pandemic - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an...
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India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
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Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
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