Books
In Conversation
Lynne Tillman with Lynn Crawford
“I don’t develop characters psychologically. In American Genius, A Comedy, I pushed to do it psychoanalytically—the character talks itself into being, through its articulations and mistakes. I wanted the novel to go into the biggest issues, like race and racism in America, and then back to the minute, like a bad dinner partner or a facial. ”
Poetry: The Weatherwomen’s Terror
By Charles BernsteinThe Weather Undergound’s 1974 Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism was a poetic manifesto on community and justice. Although self-conscious and moralistic, a recently-reissued collection of the group’s poetry is a sweet alternative to US coup hounds.
Fiction: Being Lolita in Suburbia
By Anjali WasonFredrica Wagman’s morally grey new novel is haunting in its treatment of taboo and lyrical in its observation of childhood. The book centers on ten-year old Hannah, whose mundane days are injected with salacious drama by her new neighbor the Maestro.
Fiction: Minimum City
By Hemant SareenCelebrated scribes like Suketu Mehta and Vikram Chandra end up casting the city of Mumbai in a glamorous aura. First-time-writer Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight tries to avoid such facile depictions. His slim, well-crafted book coolly handles a difficult subject: Muslim love and longing in a Hindu metropolis.
Nonfiction: Speak, Cobblestones
By Alexander NazaryanManhattan’s old Pennsylvania Station seemed like a relic from imperial Rome. Its replacement, a brutal cylinder, epitomizes the heinous fallout of urban development and renovation. Fortunately, Kevin Walsh’s Forgotten New York preserves the city’s low-rise, cobblestoned past.
Nonfiction: The Green Wean
By Paula CrossfieldSo we are addicted to oil, but what are the larger consequences? Maybe our dealings abroad lead you to think war. And why not? A struggle for control of oil resources has been going on since industrialized nations set up the infrastructure to utilize fossil fuels.
Literature: Frother’s Keeper
By Simona SchneiderThe legacy of the Oberiu, an avant-garde St. Petersburg collective born in1920s, was stifled by hard-line Soviet censorship. A new anthology brings to light its unique mixture of Romanticism, crudity and mysticism and establishes the group among its better-known contemporaries, the Surrealists and Dadaists.
