• print • Feb/Mar 2011

    Before I moved to Abu Dhabi in 2007, one of the few things I knew about the United Arab Emirates was that it was home to a vast army of slave labor, imported from the Indian subcontinent to build Pharaoh’s new glass-and-steel pyramids—not to mention staffing his grocery shops and gas stations, weeding his gardens, sweeping his floors, and paving his roads.

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  • print • Apr/May 2011

    I.

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2011

    James Carroll writes that his new book is “about the lethal feedback loop between the actual city of Jerusalem and the apocalyptic fantasy it inspires.” No one who reads the headlines or watches the evening news can possibly doubt that such a Zion-fixated end-time fantasy looms in the minds of many a pistol-packing Jewish settler, Rapture-ready Christian soldier, and aspiring Muslim martyr.

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2011

    Deb Olin Unferth’s new memoir of travel and political unrest doesn’t make you wait long to discover how her sojourn works out. Revolution, which tells how in 1987 she and her boyfriend George left college and the United States to travel to Central America and “join the revolution” (actually, any revolution), begins with a brief chapter entitled “McDonald’s,” the restaurant for which Unferth makes a beeline upon returning to the US. “I was thinking about how I already knew what the food I ordered would look like,” she writes. “I knew what the French fries would look like, what the

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2011

    Bruce Chatwin (1940–1989) may have been the last important writer in English to model his prose after Hemingway’s. When he wrote, he chiseled away everything except what he wanted the reader to see. Employing lean, declarative sentences and short paragraphs, Chatwin’s prose relied almost wholly on exact word choice and careful sentence rhythms. There’s no clutter, no mush, no padding, nothing overemphatic. Even the Shakers could learn from Chatwin’s simplicity and clarity. Take, for instance, this brief Buenos Aires vignette from an early chapter of his travel classic In Patagonia: “By day the city quivered in a silvery film of

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2011

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    The 2003 US invasion of Iraq began just as the persuasive exile Ahmad Chalabi desired. His vision, shared by neoconservative policymakers back in Washington, was that once US troops got “rid of Saddam for us,” as he put it, he himself would drive into Baghdad triumphantly, welcomed by throngs of adoring Iraqis. Chalabi, who hadn’t been to Iraq since 1958, when he was thirteen years old, patterned the idea on Charles de Gaulle’s return to Paris during World War II with the Free French.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Ambition is an attractive quality in a book, and Adam Levin’s first novel, The Instructions, is Napoleonically ambitious, a 1,030-page brick wrapped within a metafictional conceit. The book is, supposedly, a 2013 edition of a “scripture” by protagonist Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee. The first half has been translated from English into Hebrew and back into English, retaining, due to its “translingual” immutability, its original wording. This is only one of the miracles attributed to this text and to Gurion, who spends the better part of the book steadfastly insisting that he’s not the Jewish Messiah, although he eventually lets on that

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2010

    The publication of two monographs devoted to the art of David Lynch—paintings, photographs, works on paper, installations, canvases smeared with animal corpses—suggests a new way to think about an artist too often taken for an architect of dreamscapes, a fabulist of the psychosexual bizarre. The opposite is just as true: Lynch as a supremely earthly, material artist, whose great subject is the human body in all its banality—and strangeness. The most “Lynchian” of Lynch’s films are intensely corporeal: Eraserhead (1977), with its reproductive phantasmagoria; the exposed and dismantled bodies of Blue Velvet (1986); Twin Peaks (1990–91), a melodramatic labyrinth with

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    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.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    It would surely trouble John Boehner to hear it, but Karl Marx’s old aphorism about history happening the first time as tragedy, the second as farce has rarely applied with as much force as it does to today’s conservative movement. The GOP wave that swept Boehner into the House speakership in November struck pundits as a historic departure, but it’s actually part of the broader half-century conservative revolt against the idea of government. Fifty years ago, when Ronald Reagan was jaunting around the country giving speeches for General Electric, he denounced progressive taxation as tantamount to socialism, while the loyalists

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Saul Bellow died in 2005 at the age of eighty-nine, and now we have, under the editorship of Benjamin Taylor (working closely with Bellow’s widow), a collection of 708 letters out of the thousands that he wrote. The letters are to publishers and editors; boyhood friends; wives, lovers, children; the crowd of writers Bellow knew, both famous and obscure. Many of these letters are rich in gossip, declarations of love and ambition, praise, criticism, and commiseration; the most touching among them are to the writers for whom he had tender feeling (John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever) and those who

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2010

    I can’t remember whether it’s the author (played by Charlotte Rampling) or her publisher (Charles Dance), but in François Ozon’s film The Swimming Pool one of them remarks that literary prizes are like hemorrhoids: Sooner or later, every asshole gets one. This sentiment might have been used as an epigraph to the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes, an “accounting” of the many literary awards that began coming his way in the mid- 1960s. Being Thomas Bernhard, of course, it’s not just the recipients of these prizes who are “All Assholes”—“a whole row of assholes,” to be precise—it’s also the

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2010

    In her magisterial history of classical dance, Jennifer Homans tells the story of ballet’s life over four centuries: dance conventions and dance-obsessed people, ideas and political movements, sacred and profane gestures. Apollo’s Angels is a cultural history of the highest order—like Anne Hollander’s Seeing Through Clothes or Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory. The book, with its quiet, encyclopedic knowledge, relates more than a decade spent in archives around the world, reading generations of scholars. The result is neither a digital-age mash-up nor an overlong compilation of “the greatest dance stories of all time.” Homans is wholly uninterested in the

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2010

    In the final days of the Soviet Union, when the old icons were fast decaying and any future ones were frantically packing off to escape the ruins, the guardians of Russia’s past had few relics to showcase. One of the last heroes standing, a Stalin Prize winner and two-time Hero of Socialist Labor, was Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the world’s most famous automatic rifle, the AK-47. Even after the USSR fell, Kalashnikov—now ninety—has enjoyed an afterlife as a living monument to the days when the Kremlin’s fiat reached from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia and well into Africa. With characteristic

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  • print • Sept/Oct/Nov 2010

    Jonathan Franzen is, by his own account, a divided soul. “It turns out,” he once wrote, “that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience.” One was the Status model: high art, genius, Flaubert; the other was the Contract model: accessibility, pleasure, the community of readers. Of the two things for which Franzen is most famous (other, of course, than The Corrections, his 2001 National Book Award–winning best seller), both were public controversies that erupted from this very self-division. The first was his 1996 Harper’s essay that renounced the novel of cultural critique in

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2010

    A new book, a new genre—just what you’d expect from David Mitchell. Since 1999, this wunderkind of British fiction has produced a globe-spanning chain of nine semifuturistic narratives (Ghostwritten), a coming-of-age thriller set in contemporary Tokyo (Number9Dream), a Chinese box of nested tales that take us from the nineteenth century to about the twenty-third (Cloud Atlas), and a portrait of the artist as a very young Englishman (Black Swan Green). And now for something completely different—a historical novel. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, with its stately, melancholy title, is not only, for Mitchell, a new form, it is

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2010

    Reading America’s destiny in the entrails of its foreign-policy doctrines and wars is no job for amateurs. But in The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart—a Yale-to-Oxford-to-Beltway wunderkind who flew too close to the sun of liberal-hawk glory while he edited the New Republic during the Iraq war—pirouettes to keep his wings from melting and lands safely, bringing us an essay in history that’s insightful, if also a little self-serving.

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2010

    In 1950, few Americans bought modern art. Fewer still bought modern American art. The rags-to-riches story of the next fifty years, when New York transformed itself into the hothouse of the art world, is well known. Usually, the story centers on art and artists. However, powerful dealers also played a significant, if less examined, part. Two in particular, Sidney Janis (1896–1989) and Leo Castelli (1907–1999), are now emblematic figures from those glory years. They had a telling touch. Something more interesting, that is, than a Midas touch.

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2010

    Few books I’ve read carry the visceral impact of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat; it is the South African writer’s second novel and fifth book, and it is stunning. Set in the apartheid era of the 1950s into the ’90s, on a dairy farm contentiously run by a desperately unhappy white couple, Milla and Jak de Wet, and their half-adopted, half-enslaved black maid, Agaat, it is about institutional racial violence, intimate domestic violence, human violence against the natural world, pride, folly, self-deception, and the innately mixed, sometimes debased nature of human love. It is especially about how this mixed nature is

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