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By Eric Markowsky, on May 16th, 2012  Author: Jennifer duBois
2012, The Dial Press
Filed under: Literary, Historical
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that began with a more aptly chosen pair of epigraphs. Lurking in the front pages of Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, you’ll find these two gems:
All of us are doomed, but some are more doomed than others.
–Vladimir Nabokov, from Ada, or Ardor
And if in this wide world I die, then I’ll die from joy that I’m alive.
–Yevgeni Yevtushenko
The novel’s action takes place at the extremes of optimism and pessimism expressed here. Everyone in this book is doomed (some more so than others), and yet the main characters never give up on trying to make something out of their inevitable descent, looking for answers to long-buried questions, looking to leave a mark, however faint, on history. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on March 23rd, 2012  Author: Simon Van Booy
Harper Perennial, 2009
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Love Begins in Winter appeared on my desk wrapped in silver paper this past Christmas. It wasn’t on my wish list, but I accepted it with all the love that was intended from someone who had a hunch about me and about this book. You might consider my review a belated thank you card for a favorite gift, or else a form of retroactive wishing for what I have already been given.
These are rare and wonderful stories, subtle in tone, ambitious in scope, and Romantic in vision. Each one performs a precise balancing act that spans multiple settings, voices, and perspectives, a feat rendered all the more impressive by a general lack of flash in the writing. Van Booy’s prose is direct and unadorned, as enjoyable to read as it is challenging in its depiction of conflicted emotions.
But perhaps my favorite thing about the writing here is the boldness of it. “Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained,” says Bruno Bonnet, the cellist who narrates the title story. “Music and love are the same.” Van Booy’s characters are prone to lofty speculations like this, and the success of these five stories lies in their ability to support their most challenging observations, persuading readers with precise, evocative detail.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on March 12th, 2012  Author: Gary Shteyngart
2010, Random House
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.
I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.
For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 16th, 2012  [This inventive book is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Jennifer Egan
2010, Anchor Books, Random House Inc.
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
| Inventiveness.. |
10 |
The Internet probably doesn’t need another glowing review of A Visit from the Goon Squad, but I wanted to write one anyways, more for myself than anything else. Because I do love this book even though parts of it irritated me. Parts of it irritated me deeply, and yet I finished it in just a couple of sittings and then went around recommending it to friends and blathering about the story written as a series of power point slides.
When I first flipped through Goon Squad, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” caught my eye like a campus streaker: I couldn’t help looking again even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. I assumed the power point slides featured in a larger work, but when I realized that they actually comprised their own 75 page story, I prepared for the worst. Here come the gimmicks, I thought.
And I wasn’t wrong about the gimmicks; this book (whether you call it a novel or a collection of linked stories) is full of odd formal tricks and devices. I was just wrong about how well they’d all work in the end. Goon Squad is an ambitious experiment in narrative structure, successful in the extremes of its inventiveness and its willingness to overthrow all of our expectations about time. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on December 16th, 2011 Author: Joan Leegant
2010, W.W. Norton & Co.
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Wherever You Go is set primarily in Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, though it focuses on the lives of three Americans with complicated relationships with Judaism. Yona wants to reconnect with her extremely devout sister; Greenglass, once saved from a life of drugs by religion, is suffering a crisis of faith; and Aaron aims to prove to his father and the rest of the world that he is a worthy son of the Holy Land.
Each of the individual narratives works well enough at first, but they never come together in any sort of a satisfying way. When the strands do begin to intertwine, about two thirds of the way through the book, their interactions seem more convenient than anything else, providing the characters with contrived opportunities to bring their stories to some kind of closure.
For me, the biggest disappointment was the failure to make the most of the setting. Wherever You Go does very little to evoke any kind of a textured world or to convey any sense of what makes Jerusalem and the rest of Israel unique. People eat falafel and cucumber and tomato salad. Most of the Israelis are “from central casting.” It’s very hot. That’s about it. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on December 14th, 2011 All in all, 2011 was a pretty good year for poetry. Not only did a poet win this year’s Nobel Prize for literature (way to go Tomas Transtromer), not only did this year’s National Book Award for Poetry winner give an awesome acceptance speech (really well done, Nikky Finney), but a bunch of my favorite poets all published new books to boot, including Dean Young, Billy Collins, Adam Zagajewski, Stephen Dunn, and Derek Walcott.
Below, you’ll a find a few more reasons to celebrate some of the
Best New Poetry of 2011
.
 Collected Body, by Valzhyna Mort
Last year, I ended my “Best Poetry of 2010” post by looking to the future. I wanted to plug Valzhna’s Mort’s upcoming collection because I’d hear her read locally, and I just about fell in love with her. Now here’s the reminder I promised you: read Collected Body. It doesn’t disappoint. I could try to give you a thorough rundown of what makes this collection distinctive, but I don’t know that I could do a better job than L.A. Grove has already done at the California Journal of Poetics. Read the review here and then give Collected Body the attention it deserves.
 Flies, by Michael Dickman
Michael Dickman’s second collection won this year’s James Laughlin Award for the best second book by an American poet. His verse is spare and often unnerving, leaving lines precariously balanced on the backs of single words. I found a lot of what I read in Flies funny, if darkly funny, without really being able to say what exactly it was I was laughing at, as if I were laughing just to break the tension in the room even though I was alone.
The Back Chamber, by Donald Hall
Stumbling across Donald Hall’s new collection felt like running into a favorite old teacher at the supermarket on a trip back home. I remember hearing Hall read when I was in high school and thinking for the first time that maybe it was possible for real live people to write poetry, too; that poetry wasn’t the sole province of the legendary dead I read about in my English classes. I still think of that as one of Hall’s greatest achievements: demonstrating the literary potential of every day. His simple diction and formal clarity continue to testify to the power of ordinary events so long as we are prepared to pay attention.
 Come, Thief, by Jane Hirshfield
Not a poet I know much about, this collection came as a pleasant surprise. Come, Thief is Hirshfield’s seventh collection, the followup to After, which was shortlisted for the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize. Hirshfield’s voice is commanding, moving the reader effortlessly through images and scenes that often appear at disjunctive, or sometimes seem to appear out of nowhere, but which inevitably yield some resonance, as if each poem produced an echo to fill the moment of silence that it created. Aphoristic and colored by Zen philosophy, Come, Thief invites long consideration of its smallest gestures.
By Eric Markowsky, on October 20th, 2011  Author: John Paul Stevens
2011, Little, Brown and Co.
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
| Informative... |
9 |
In case you hadn’t heard, it’s Supreme Court Season again, which means our nation’s top judges are now hearing cases that will affect your life. Holding top billing, we have The State of Florida (and 26 other co-signing states) v. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will test the constitutionality of last year’s controversial healthcare overhaul. But this is only one case of many, and, as Atlantic legal correspondent Garrett Epps points out, the majority of the cases the court will hear this session “have huge practical impact but are devoid of drama.”
You might say the same thing about Five Chiefs. Without an ounce of sensationalism or any inflammatory rhetoric, it offers an insider’s perspective on the deliberative processes of our nation’s foremost deliberating body. Stevens presents a historical survey of the Court under each of its seventeen Chief Justices, focusing on the five who sat during the years he was personally associated with the Court, from his clerkship in 1947 until his resignation in 2010.
It’s an eye-opening look at how the Court actually works, from the influence of the Chief’s management style to the long-standing traditions meant to foster cordiality between people who are paid to argue with each other. Five Chiefs won’t keep you up at night, but it will make you think about how we decide some of the most important questions facing the country today… so maybe it will keep a you up at night. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 6th, 2011  Author: Chad Harbach
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Literary.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
For fifty pages, I was hooked. Henry Skrimshander is a small-town kid with an almost supernatural sense for playing shortstop. He’s discovered at what might have been the last game of his career and recruited to play for Westish College, a small D III school in Wisconsin. Under the guidance of Mike Schwartz, the Westish teammate who discovered him, Henry rises into the ranks of the nation’s best college players. His future seems bright and assured.
Then we’re introduced to Guert Affenlight, the President of Westish College. He’s an interesting guy, but his story doesn’t really have as much to do with Henry as Henry’s roommate, Owen, and there’s Guert’s daughter, Pella, who’s fleeing a failed marriage. Also, Schwartz is having some problems figuring out his life after graduation.
The writing is solid throughout, the characters are convincing and likable enough that I never felt totally dissatisfied, but I often found myself pushing through chapters wondering when all of this was going to get back to Henry, because (surprise) his bright future might not be such a sure thing after all. Unfortunately, Henry’s perspective and his trials on the diamond occupy less space as the novel progresses, and the work as a whole suffers for it.
…
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By Eric Markowsky, on September 16th, 2011  Author: Stuart Nadler
2011, Regan Arthur Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
In seven longer-than-average short stories, Stuart Nadler takes on fathers and sons, lovers and ex-lovers, philandering philanderers, sibling rivalries, and orphans of all ages. These stories are expansive, opening landscapes of regret and redemption all along the Northeast Corridor. Each one boasts moments of hard-earned clarity rendered with a degree of precision that made me pause to admire their craftsmanship, craftsmanship I found all the more impressive for the complexity of the stories themselves.
While Nadler’s prose is simple and direct, the tales he tells tend to distort conventional relationships almost beyond recognition. In one, a girlfriend hires a surrogate temptress to test her boyfriend. In another, a man, his lover, her husband, and their children all add up to something like a family. In other hands, setups like these could easily descend into melodrama; in Nadler’s hands the result is something much less predictable and much more memorable. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on August 29th, 2011 [In this new series (idea copped from High Fidelity), our contributors put together a "top 5" list of books on a theme of their choosing. Read other entries in Top 5 Books here, and catch up on other fun series like this on our Special Features page.]
Pretty much every night before I turn off the light, I read in bed for a while first. It’s a way of focusing myself for sleep, a way of driving off the stray concerns of day by replacing them with a singular voice. Mostly, this works for me, but I’ve learned over the years that reading in bed can be a dangerous proposition. I come from a line of pretty adept insomniacs to begin with, so put a good book in my hands and I’m apt to forget why I was in bed in the first place until it’s already 3 am. If the book isn’t good enough, though, then it just doesn’t do the trick. I lay my head down still full of whatever was hassling my mind during the day.
To that end, I’ve identified a certain kind of book that puts me to sleep in the best possible way. Each of these books comes doled out in small doses of strangeness, short, experimental pieces I can finish in a few minutes while I’m winding down and still take away something worth dreaming about.
Five Books to Take to Bed
 5. The Weather of Words, by Mark Strand
This collection of “poetic inventions” presents one of America’s greatest living poets at his most nimble. It includes literary criticism, personal essays, prose poems, and fictional encounters with Jorge Luis Borges and a President who likes to read Chekhov to his cabinet. In whatever form it takes, Strand’s voice is always confident and compelling. He could write for the IRS and probably manage to make the tax code riveting reading. Thankfully, he has a lot more imagination than that. …
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