Sometimes a banana is just a banana.
But The Fish That Ate the Whale (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Rich Cohen’s absorbing, nimble and unapologetically affectionate account of the life of Sam Zemurray, the so-called Banana Man, who began his astonishing tropical-fruit odyssey as a penniless teenage Russian-Jewish immigrant, peddling “ripes” in the deep south, and Read More
Harper, $26.99.
Lionel Shriver wrote her latest novel, The New Republic, before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and, according to the book’s foreword, held it back until both her sales record and the public appetite for a terrorism-themed satire increased. Her first stroke of good fortune came swiftly when her 2003 novel We Need Read More
Putting aside the question of nature versus nurture and focusing on the (semi-)recent ruling in New York regarding gay marriage, it is possible to imagine proud parents George Saunders and Philip K. Dick (using Margaret Atwood as a surrogate mother) raising Miles Klee’s Ivyland (OR, 250 pages, $16.00) as their own lovechild. The features of all three great authors (and doting parents) can be found in this first novel: a somewhat dystopic present/future; mandatory and recreational drug abuse; nature gone wild; protagonists prone to accidental violence; shadowy government and corporate agencies; miracles; terrorism; New Jersey.
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Geoff Dyer’s topics can be feints. An essay about doughnuts turns out to be more about Nietzsche’s eternal return and the dissolution of place, while one about Marvel Comics hops to The Ice Storm, hallucinogens and the Renaissance. It’s easy to peg him as a riffer, the writerly equivalent of a jazz musician, especially since he’s written a book about jazz, but a bass player never knew such breadth Read More
In a 2008 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Vivian Gornick traced the slow development of the Jewish-American voice from the patois of ghetto sentimentality to the outsider yawp of Saul Bellow, making a claim on the latter part of that hyphenated identity, through to Philip Roth’s snarling to break free from the newfound assimilation. The voice is recognizable, she writes, by its “violent rush of words that announced the arrival of a narrating voice whose signature traits were a compulsive brilliance, an exuberant nastiness, and a take-no-prisoners humor edged in self-laceration.”
“At the heart of the enterprise,” Ms. Gornick continues, “lay a self-regard that made the writing rise to unmatched levels of verbal glitter and daring, even as its dangerously narrowed scope ruled out sympathy, much less compassion, for any character on the page other than the narrator himself.” Read More
In 1977, Dorothy Hall went to a screening to watch her daughter, Diane Keaton, star in a new Woody Allen film, Annie Hall. She wrote about the experience in her journal:
I only saw Diane, her mannerisms, expressions, dress, hair, etc, the total her. The story took second place … She looked beautiful … She Read More
Helen Dewitt’s new novel, Lightning Rods (New Directions, 192 pages, $24.95), takes place in an America outside time. This America is in some ways aggressively contemporary, a lawsuit-plagued land of the horny and the litigious. But it is also backward-looking, insofar as it’s a landscape roamed by door-to-door salesmen, a breed whose numbers have, in reality, probably dwindled to bison levels but who, in Ms. Dewitt’s novel, are as ready as ever to offer encyclopedias and Electrolux vacuum cleaners to the unsuspecting housewives of the Midwest. They receive home-baked pie, these salesmen. Read More
If you missed Bristol Palin‘s baby daddy Levi Johnston at the Russian Tea Room last night promoting his new book, then you probably didn’t have the chance to ask him what the deal was with pistachios. Or moose meat. Or all the bear metaphors. Read More
In November 1853, a 46-year-old candle-maker set sail from Staten Island for Europe, where he had been one of the most famous soldiers since the fall of Napoleon 40 years before. Giuseppe Garibaldi was already one-half on his way to becoming “the Hero of Two Worlds” of legend, as he had the previous decade fought for Uruguayan independence in South America. His fighting on behalf of his native soil, however, had not gone so spectacularly. Read More
Shoplifters may be the only criminals for whom the nightmare of getting caught ends with a blush. The anxiety isn’t that shoplifting is illegal, exactly. It’s that it is not illegal enough. The fleur de mal looks embarrassingly like a daisy. “Stealing household trinkets remains too shameful for words […],” writes Rachel Shteir in The Read More
