THIS IS A GOTHIC TALE. In the summer of 2002, a professional illustrator and single mom in Chicago went to her fortieth-birthday bash, a gypsy-themed affair that her young daughter told her not to attend. A premonition? At the party, a mosquito bit her. Perhaps she slapped it dead; maybe it stayed attached, vampirically feasting. […]
I LOVE NOVELS WITH INCREDIBLE review quotes on the cover, the kind that make you feel around for your wallet. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, for one, lured me with a doozy by William Kennedy from the New York Times Book Review, who called it “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the human race.” The best quotes follow you around as you read, subtly inflecting your experience, perhaps even shaping your final, favorable judgment. (“Hey—this is kind of like the Book of Genesis!”)
For a writer whose most visible work, Dictée, brims with saints and martyrdom and the possibilities of productive anguish, it’s fitting that Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disparate uncollected writings—everything from artists’ books to typewritten disjecta membra—should give off the refulgent glow of relics set against plain white cloth. Since there will be no new writing from the late author, every word counts. Indeed, for an artist so committed to permutations of language—to literally mincing words, teasing meanings from amputations, one character at a time—every letter counts. Is a crossed-out line or seeming typo in fact some intimation of wordplay, language
LAST FEBRUARY, with the NHL’s 2020–21 pandemic-shortened season just a month old, The Atlantic published an impertinent provocation: “Hockey Has a Gigantic-Goalie Problem.” The title was literal. Ken Dryden’s piece traced the sport’s arms race, as the refinement of the slap shot and the switch from wooden sticks to lighter composites turned pucks into lethal missiles. This required additional padding for the netkeeper, while the dimensions of his domain remained the same. Amid a worldwide health crisis, Dryden’s jeremiad made it sound like oversize equipment jeopardized the spirit of the game, if not civilization itself.
A DECADE AND A HALF AGO, a book so enchanted me that it was hard to pull away. If I were to get any of my own work done, I needed to hide it. (The book was very long, over eight hundred pages; I didn’t have the time.) But the tome kept jumping back into my hands. I could have given it away, of course, or simply tossed the thing, but surely at some point—when this oppressive spell of work was over—I’d want to dive back in. I had only finished a third, perhaps less. One day, I came across
Bless an author with a long enough career, and even the most outcast elements can get a second chance. In Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic, pull-out-the-stops first novel, V. (1963), the Upper West Side merits only a withering dismissal:
In Sweden, according to Lars Arffssen’s recent novel, “Nordic Dullness Syndrome” affects millions. The country’s mores are hard to parse: While “semi-consensual intercourse with a drowsy woman” constitutes a despicable crime, its citizens conduct adulterous affairs so nonchalantly that the husband is often sitting in the same room, distracted by his iPad. The book’s delirious plotlines extend to an IKEA-like company’s shadowy past, but the central mystery gets announced early on: “Why would anyone want to decapitate an unpublished author of Swedish thrillers?”
For about five years, beginning in 1995, I worked on the copy desk at the Village Voice. Aiding me in the battle against error were Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the fourteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, published in 1993, and a samizdat-looking document containing the house style rules and bearing the enigmatic title “Small Craft Warnings.” At any given moment one or all of these vade mecums lay open on my desk; the answer for anything could be found therein.
