Colson Whitehead, our greatest living novelist, returns to Harlem in his final novel in the trilogy featuring Ray Carney, a furniture store owner and part-time fence for stolen goods. Cool Machine dazzles, both in the wordplay we expect from Whitehead and in the energetic thrum imbued in his writing. To fully appreciate this novel, readers […]
If you value that there was once a Cormac McCarthy in the world, a writer who had his characters say such things as “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery,” then it’s more than recommended you pick up an Ian McGuire novel. His settings are […]
In Gordon Corera’s The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, we read how in 1968 a sixteen-year-old street tough swaggered his way up to the KGB building in Leningrad to ask how he could get a job there. He was told to come back when he either completed military […]
It’s not unusual for revered writers to lose some of their literary vitality as they age (sorry, Don DeLillo). It also appears that Ian McEwan received his immunization against this particular affliction. What We Can Know, his 18th novel, is a prescient work of fiction that both charms and haunts. And similar to McEwan’s Atonement, […]
Imagine being stuck in a life raft on the Pacific Ocean for 118 days. Now imagine your spouse being in that bobbing raft with you. The addition of the spouse into the scenario is not meant to elicit a cheap laugh. The change in setting has a genuine bearing on one’s attitude. Instantly relieved? Or […]
The mind’s eye tends to summon associated grandeur when visualizing Elizabethan England. The reality is that if you were a contemporary from, say, Italy, all-things-English really wasn’t worth your time. There was no point in learning English, as anything of value written by an English author would have been available in Latin. Also pointless was […]
The North Pole, according to Erling Kagge, exists as a reductio ad absurdum. Having no longitude, it’s really no place at all. The same applies to the South Pole, of course. But unlike the South Pole, walking to the top of the world must be accomplished atop sea pack ice. Once there, fixing your position […]
In John Seabrook’s The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, the author notes Andrew Carnegie’s dictum of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” It’s a fitting citation as the American dynasty at play here is in fact his own family. How the proverb diverges with the Seabrooks in particular is that […]
A quick glance at the cover of Austin Kelley’s novel, The Fact Checker, and you’ll recognize by font alone that the fact-checking taking place is at The New Yorker. The magazine in the novel is unnamed, but we get the gist. Plus, Kelley’s bio states that he was once a fact checker at—you got it—The […]
January 28, 1986, was the day NASA’s carefully cultivated image literally blew up at 46,000 feet. If you are of a certain age, you probably recall where you were when you heard the news. That morning, the space shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. The inquiry that followed […]
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