A Naked Singularity University of Chicago Press, May 2012 by Sergio De La Pava (This review was published in the Washington Independent Review of Books, May 2012) Crack open this fat novel with the zingy black and white moiré cover, retro-psychedelia in all its head-trip glory, and you are faced with an ominous epigraph, two […]
Posts Tagged ‘literary fiction’
Think Seinfeld and Kramer meet Elmore Leonard and Herman Melville…
Thursday, May 17th, 2012Fly me to the moons, 1Q84 review – an Editor’s Pick on Open Salon
Friday, November 4th, 2011Now appearing on the cover (today anyway) of Open Salon, an Editor’s Pick – cool.
Fly me to the moons
Friday, November 4th, 2011(This review was published in The Washington Independent Review of Books on November 2, 2011) On January 22, 1984, in what has become an iconic moment in advertising history, the first Apple Macintosh computer was introduced to the world. Striking a cinematic blow against an Orwellian Big Brother figure haranguing a grey and faceless army […]
The stereo of fine historical fiction
Friday, September 16th, 2011David Mitchell, after writing his first historical novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, said that one of the great appeals of the genre is that it “delivers a stereo narrative: from one speaker comes the treble of the novel’s own plot while the other plays the bass of history’s plot.” Well, I’m here […]
Up on critter creek…
Sunday, August 7th, 2011My digital turntable is spinning. I have flipped on the magical Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Rob Young, writing in his marvelous new survey of Britain’s “visionary music” of the last one hundred years, Electric Eden, calls the piece, “magisterial…gliding out of the dock like a gigantic galleon.” This […]
