Literature, both high and low.
The Great Man interpretation of history — the idea that civilization is driven by a few exceptional men of will who impose their vision on the world and shape the development of humanity — was never particularly true, but it’s only been recently that it stopped being taught. Most of …
The dominant mode of the crime novel in pre-war European fiction was much as it had been since the birth of the genre: the whodunit. Unreeling a mystery, clue by clue, until some heroic or slightly quirky detective could triumphantly announce the identity of the evildoer was the essential nature …
As noted when we talked about John Merriman’s Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, my reading project for this year, where the only nonfiction I read will be about the Paris Commune of 1871 and the French revolts of May 1968, will begin at the end. Massacre, while an …
Paul Kingsnorth, it’s safe to say, is a man of special talent. His work with the Dark Mountain Project — one of the only cultural movements to take seriously the concept of a post-human world — and his insightful environmental journalism alone would be enough to establish his brilliance and …
Stephen King adaptations, as my friend Scott Von Doviak can tell you, are a real mixed bag. When you’re the best-selling author since Johnny Bible, though, everything you write is eventually going to find its way to the big screen, sometimes more than once. The holiday season saw the release …
This year, I made the decision that all the non-fiction I would read would be about two events, separated by a century but bonded in the blood: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the revolts that spread across France in May of 1968. Both are events that have had a …
It’s been ten years since Donald Westlake left us, and it’s a loss that’s still deeply felt for those of us with a taste for pure throwback noir novels. Westlake was the creator and author, under the pseudonym Richard Stark, of a series of novels featuring the enigmatic professional criminal …
The curious economic logic of streaming services has had a pretty devastating effect on the availability of classic cinema. I’ve written before about how streaming media should have created a situation in which any movie of any kind from any era would be available for anyone to watch any time …
“Welcome to the season premiere of BookTalk. This is our seventeenth season, and of course, we could never have gotten this far without your support. We’ve always aimed to bring you only the very best of in-depth discussions of literature and the fine arts, so of course I’m pleased to welcome …
The apocalypse in fiction fulfills a lot of deep, and predictably dark, needs in the human psyche. Zombie stories are usually an exercise in psychopathy, indulging a curiously common instinct to portray the commission of mass murder without moral consequences; tales of nuclear or other technological holocaust portray a surface …
Neil Gaiman is in the news again. Some concatenation of dullards is trying to raise half a million dollars for charity, in exchange for which the dreamer of dreams and seller of stories will – and, I am not, I can assure you, making this up, though I wish I …
Ottessa Moshfegh is a hot property right now. Establishing herself as a writer of excellent stories in the early 2010s in the Paris Review and Granta, she has just published her first collection of short fiction, Homesick for Another World. It was her first novel, however, that really put her …
Fascism, for reasons that should not be difficult to divine, has been very much on my mind of late. My bedside table has borne a stack of books about the growth, nature, and origins of fascism, mixed in with the novels, for the last six months or so, and understanding …
Ever since the early days of film and television, the question has been asked: how much fidelity does an adaptation owe to its source material? I don’t think there’s any one useful answer to this question. there have been exceedingly faithful adaptations that have been wonderful (John Huston’s version of The …
This will be my last entry of 2016. Next year will begin, barring some unexpected act of fate, with the ascension to the presidency of Donald Trump, as dim-witted, incurious, crass, and crooked human being that has ever held public office in America. Trump has spent the hours since the …
