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By BEN SZMANDA
I had every intention of being done with SciFi for a while. But then something happened: I was reading part of The Water Margin, and the temptation to bring up a topic I have refrained from mentioning before had become too strong. So we’re talking about William Gibson’s Neuromancer today.
If […]
By BEN SZMANDA
The author/narrator in Ivan Klima’s dense, thoughtful book Love and Garbage keeps returning to Kafka. It’s not specifically his stories that he keeps pondering, rather, he seems to be trying to get inside Kafka’s head, to figure out what he was thinking about and what he was attempting to do. Anyone […]
By BEN SZMANDA
The show Law and Order is ubiquitous; anytime you want to watch it — if you really feel compelled, for some reason — you can turn on your TV, change the channel no less than three times, and watch Richard Belzer beat up child molesters for an hour. This is because every […]
By BEN SZMANDA
“A clear case where one can do nothing,” I thought, uncomfortably aware that an earlier generation of travelers, the kind you find in Graham Greene novels, would certainly have tried to intervene, even if it involved a lot of unpleasantness for themselves. I have often been forced to see that […]
By BEN SZMANDA
The end of the cold war seemed to offer the beginnings of better times. It didn’t always turn out that way though, and a lot of the assumptions people made back then were overly optimistic, if not flat out delusional. Nowhere was that felt more acutely than in Russia. The […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Growing up is hard; most people only manage to partially pull off the trick. No, this isn’t a reference to the thirty year olds who still call themselves “punk” or “goth” or whatever– they’re too easy — I’m talking about the ones who still act like the unspoken playground rules still apply […]
By BEN SZMANDA
There are critics out there, like James Wood, who cannot stand Don Delillo’s influence on American literature. They may have some valid points, but they can’t really shake the reason why he’s been so dominant: Simply, he is one of the sharpest observers of American culture out there. His insights have been dizzying, […]
By ANDREW STEEVES
steeves(at)uwm.edu
Of all the classical fantasy series, I enjoy The Golden Compass trilogy (alternately known as His Dark Materials) the most. Phillip Pullman writes with a skill unparalleled by other “great” authors. He creates a world of richness and depth without boring them to tears like Tolkein; he contemplates […]
By BEN SZMANDA
John Barth has had a long career as a “post-modern novelist,” and he’s managed to avoid the traps of that school: Namely, he doesn’t remind you of Borges, and he alleviates the overall tone of “Gosh aren’t I clever” with a good dose of humor. There are a few of […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Note to all those offended by left wing barroom table pounding: You may want to pass this one by. Love you, see you next week!
Once upon a time, back, say, five years ago, calling the U.S. an empire was grounds for exile from the grown up’s table. These days, though, […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Madison Smartt Bell has garnered some notice for his “All Souls Rising” series about the Haitian revolution. He should, but his other work needs some attention too. Go check out his 1993 book Save Me, Joe Louis. Not only can he write about revolution in Haiti, but he can write convincingly […]
By BEN SZMANDA
‘It’s a Wellington thing—it’s a student thing,” said Victoria rapidly, coming up on her elbows. It’s shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is “the tomatoes nature versus the tomatoes nurture”, And Jane Colman’s class is “ to properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory—she’s […]
By BEN SZMANDA
He doesn’t get the credit he deserves, but Belgium’s King Leopold II should be on any list of major 20th century monsters. Under his management, the Congo saw as many as 15 million people killed by starvation, over exhaustion, disease and outright murder — all related to the King’s brutal rubber mining […]
By BEN SZMANDA
It’s hard to provide great personal detail and a sense of place in a few words. Mona Simspon manages the trick in her small, stark, masterful, novella Off Keck Road. In it, Simspon tells the story of two women, Bea and Shelly, as they grow up and old in the small town […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Ordinarily, writing a review of a book like Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” is kind of silly because offering an opinion other than “It was completely terrible and a total waste of time” isn’t all that interesting. I can’t say that. But I think it would probably be worth going over it […]
By BEN SZMANDA
I really try to avoid thinking about celebrities, but lord help me, I hate Oprah. Everything she spawns, from her miserably “life-affirming” TV show, to her self named magazine, to Dr. Phil — the guy most responsible for making psychological counseling a deeply icky reality TV event — reeks of cultish self promotion. […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Just because something is well crafted does not mean it’s good. In some cases it may be barely readable. I hate to say it, but Richard Stern’s “Pacific Tremors” falls in this category. Stern is a very good writer; the dialogue is as sharp and realistic as any you will […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Gore Vidal has always been a political oddity. Post Reagan revolution, though — now that the NAFTA signing, welfare “reforming” Bill Clinton is the face of liberalism — he can seem downright confounding. Especially when it comes to his historical writing.
People don’t expect to read that someone known for radical (as well as […]
By BEN SZMANDA
In 1937, the Dominican strongman Generalissimo Trujillo ordered the execution of every Haitian within the borderland of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Soldiers and civilians attacked migrants with machetes, and, within five days, as many as 35,000 people were murdered. Apparently, “the Parsley Massacre,” as it became known, was intended […]
By BEN SZMANDA
The guy who coined the term cyberspace has removed himself from the sci fi genre for a while. William Gibson says his past two novels have been set in the present, rather than the future, because he’s still trying to puzzle the present out. It’s funny to say it about such […]
By BEN SZMANDA
It’s no secret that mass media can spawn a strange religious devotion. We are constantly being fed images of people as manufactured objects of desire. We even call them by their rightful names: Icons. So it’s not surprising that some folks invest way too much energy in them, or that these icons can […]
By BEN SZMANDA
According to one reviewer on Amazon.com, Mark Richard used to run his writing workshop something like a religious revival. I believe it: That kind of rapturous energy is evident in his writing, and it’s is one of the reasons why his book of short stories, “Charity,” has been a longtime favorite of mine.
The […]
By BEN SZMANDA
There are some books out there that you really don’t understand until you’re partway through. “The Sound and the Fury” was like that for me: I knew there were multiple characters narrating, and I figured out when it changes over from one to the other, but I couldn’t tell which character was […]
By BEN SZMANDA
I read Mircea Eliade’s “The Myth of Eternal Return” in college, and I remember really enjoying it — right up until the end, where Eliade claims that the weight of history is so horrifying that we have no choice but to come to Christ. It made me cock my head a bit.
Why would […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Paul Bowles’ frighteningly prescient novel, “The Spider’s House,” takes a look at the 1954 nationalist uprising in Morocco, and manages not only to succeed as a masterful novel, but to go a long way toward describing underlying problems which haunt us today.
The story follows a British expatriate named John Stenham, an American […]
By BEN SZMANDA
I guess Cees Nooteboom is known more for his poetry than his prose. Unfortunately — for us English speaking monoglots, anyway — none of his poetry has been translated into our tongue. What we do have is pretty good though: for example, his short novel “The Following Story” is definitely worth […]
By BEN SZMANDA
I picked up Ian Speigelman’s “Everyone’s Burning,” fully expecting not to like it. There’s a reason I’m talking magical teenagers this week: Hype really irritates me. Hype of the “underground” — read: Niche market — variety is even worse. This one was waved in my face for a while, with […]
By BEN SZMANDA
In my review of Elizabeth Inness-Brown’s book of short stories, here, I noted that she seemed to lean heavily on the 1st person narrative. There were three exceptions, the strongest was The Surgeon, which followed a doctor as his wife died of cancer. Inness-Brown’s debut novel “Burning Marguerite” approaches one […]
By BEN SZMANDA
I was never one for fantasy books. This isn’t snobbishness talking: I love my share of genre stuff, and as far as I’m concerned, all voters have the sacred right to engage in as much escapism as possible. Fantasy just always seemed excessive, though, because it felt like there was no […]
By BEN SZMANDA
Keeping with the theme of persecuted writers, let’s take a look at Nobel Prize Winner Orhan Pamuk’s lovely book “Snow.” Pamuk faced jail time for the utterly ridiculous charge of “insulting Turkishness.” Why? Because he had to gall to mention that the Turks took the lives of over a million […]