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Michael H. Miller

By Michael H. Miller 11/27/12 4:35pm

books

Gary Shteyngart. (Photo by Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images)

Leninglad! Celebrating 10 Years of Gary Shteyngart, Contemporary Literature’s Hairiest, Funniest Author

Early on in Gary Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, the fickle protagonist, Vladimir Girshkin, a 25-year-old employee at the fictional Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society in New York, has gone to Westchester to receive his perennial guilt trip and a free meal from his parents. Vladimir’s mother has become a moderately successful businesswoman in the U.S. after the family’s departure from their native Leningrad, the city from which Mr. Shteyngart himself emigrated when he was 7. When Vladimir attempts escape to catch the 4:51 train back to the city, his mother, drunk on rum, detains him and makes him pace the house’s master bedroom.

“You walk like a Jew,” she tells him. “I’ve been keeping my eyes on you for years, but it just hit me today, your little Jew-walk. Come here, I’ll teach you to walk like a normal person.” Vladimir braces himself for a long afternoon. Read More

By Jason Diamond 11/19/12 8:25pm

books

Philip Roth.

Exit Roth: What Will Happen to Jewish Fiction Now That Philip Roth Has Called It Quits?

The phrase “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” has been a rallying cry in music since Neil Young crooned it over 30 years ago. But it’s writers who seem to best embody the sentiment: the burnouts who did themselves in, like Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, tend to be romanticized long after their deaths by those who believe an untimely end completes some sort of narrative of depression; the ones who fade, the writers who keep pushing out words till their last breath, may not be eulogized, but at least they get to spend their golden years doing what they (presumably) love.

Last month, Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest living writers and its reigning curmudgeon, took a very different route toward career conclusion: he quit. The 79-year-old author of 27 novels, dozens of short stories and countless essays, and the recipient of nearly every major literary award save the Nobel Prize, told an interviewer for the French publication Les Inrocks, “To tell you the truth, I’m done.” His 2010 novel Nemesis would be his last book. Read More

By Carla Blumenkranz 11/19/12 6:19pm

books

Alice Munro.

Northern Exposure: Alice Munro Goes Back to Canada, Offering a Glimpse at Her Childhood Home and Her Writing Process

Alice Munro has published 14 short story collections, but only three recent ones have come with accounts of their creation. The title story of Too Much Happiness (2009), which focuses on a Russian novelist and mathematician, prompted an acknowledgments page about the research that went into it. With disarming enthusiasm, Ms. Munro explains that she came across the life of Sophia Kovalevsky, who died in the late 19 century, while looking for something else in the encyclopedia. She was so taken by Kovalevsky’s story that she transformed her into one of the many eager, frustrated young women whose lives Ms. Munro has been narrating for decades. Read More

By Brian Thomas Gallagher 11/13/12 8:27pm

books

antidote

Life Sucks, But Maybe That’s a Good Thing? Oliver Burkeman’s New Book Makes a Case for Pessimists

I don’t remember when I began saying it, though as a worldview it seems to have always been with me. Whenever things are bad—annoying, unpleasant, dire, morbid, arduous, depressing—and someone offhandedly says, “It could be worse,” I always reply, “And it probably will be.” I certainly never thought of it as a morale booster, more of a sardonic rejoinder to a mindless remark, a platitude in response to a platitude. It turns out, though, that this approach might be a more helpful response to the darker corners of human existence than I thought.

In his new book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (Faber & Faber, 256 pp., $25), which is to say, intelligent people, Oliver Burkeman recalls finding himself chatting with the pre-eminent behavioral psychologist Albert Ellis, then in his nineties. One of the main methods Ellis advocates for modulating one’s view of life is realizing “the difference between a terrible outcome and a merely undesirable one.” Many of the events that cause us anxiety and unhappiness are in fact not nearly as bad as the level of emotional fervor we cover ourselves in while fearing them. Taking this thinking to its extreme, to prove the point, Ellis pointed out, “If you are slowly tortured to death, you could always be tortured to death slower.” In other words, it could be worse. (And it probably will. Ellis died shortly after Mr. Burkeman met with him.) Read More

By Michael H. Miller 11/01/12 2:47pm

books

PowerHouse Arena.

Dumbo’s PowerHouse Arena Shut Down By Hurricane Sandy

PowerHouse Arena, on Main Street along Brooklyn’s water front, will close temporarily after being devastated by the storm surge Monday night. The bookstore is a fixture of the Brooklyn literary scene, and the site of many book launch parties. The scheduled events for the next week have all been postponed. Here’s what they had to say in an e-mail message: Read More

By John McMillian 10/31/12 9:30am

Music

(Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

From Me to You: John Lennon’s Letters Show a Thoughtful Writer and a Real Curmudgeon

Shortly after John Lennon was assassinated on December 8, 1980, the critic Robert Christgau printed his wife’s lament in the Village Voice: “Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon?” she asked. “Why isn’t it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?”

It was a distasteful remark, but it’s hard to dispute. Paul has long been a cheerful purveyor of pleasing pop songs, but John was by far the wittiest, most audacious and most intelligent Beatle. He was also troubled, arrogant and fragile. He was a man of many moods, and those moods were always uncontainable. Even before he became famous, Lennon’s teachers and schoolmates knew him to be clever with a pen and paper, and (people sometimes forget) in the mid-’60s he wrote two well-received books: In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. It is little wonder, then, that Lennon’s collected letters—285 of them, richly contextualized and handsomely presented by editor Hunter Davies in the new volume The John Lennon Letters (Little, Brown, 392 pp., $29.99)—make for fascinating reading. Read More

By Ray LeMoine 10/31/12 9:00am

books

THe Real Romney

Breaking News or Political Smut? It’s Both!

Should Barack Obama win re-election, the most significant moment of 2012 will not have come from the president but from an ex-president. On a sticky Wednesday night in Charlotte this past summer, Bill Clinton took the DNC stage and did something Mr. Obama hasn’t been able to do: he made sense of the president’s policies and showed the other side to be full of, well, malarkey. People cried on the convention floor during Bubba’s appearance, just like many had during Mr. Obama’s speech in Denver four years ago. But I didn’t see any tears during the president’s acceptance speech this time around. Even Nate Silver couldn’t have predicted how much would change between 2008 and today.

Cue late October. The man who rose to the White House on his oratorical skills is tied with a technocrat just about everyone deemed a robot. Mr. Obama’s failure to communicate in 2012 is just one example of why this is one of the most interesting elections for political geeks in decades. It lacks the visual and historic beauty of 2008, the character assassination and Iraq war drama of 2004. It hasn’t been sexy; it’s been all about politics. Read More

By Justin Taylor 10/24/12 8:45am

books

Schutt.

Friends With(out) Benefits: Christine Schutt’s Portrait of a Dying Marriage

In his preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James relays a story he once heard Ivan Turgenev tell about his writing process:

It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. Read More