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Category Archives: fiction
Dr. Tung’s Evil 3-D House of Shrubbery
Terry Brooks’ Magic Kingdom for Sale: Sold begins with an intriguing premise: a depressed lawyer from Chicago sees an ad for a magic kingdom in an upscale Christmas catalogue and decides he has little to lose. The scenario isn’t super-original … Continue reading
La Mano de Dios
At one point in the novel Cold Mountain, the young heroine takes time out from trying to survive in Civil War-torn Carolina for some auto-erotic activity. She fantasizes about a certain man she knows, and author Charles Frazier explains that, … Continue reading
Posted in fiction, Uncategorized
Tagged Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, Emma Donoghue, Life-Mask, sexy hands, Stir-Fry
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His Master’s Voice
John Banville and Colm Tóibín, the two most brilliant contemporary Irish novelists*, make something of an odd couple. Banville habitually puts us at the mercy of a narrator who might be crotchety and cantankerous (The Sea or might be a … Continue reading
Lying is an art…I do it exceptionally well.
Last weekend I heard this piece on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2012/03/08/148040132/lifespan-what-are-the-limits-of-literary-license John D’Agata wrote an essay about a boy’s suicide, in which many of the facts were made up–in other words, it was a piece of fiction based on a true story. … Continue reading
Is this the party to whom I am speaking?
On September 23, 1960, at a gathering in the UW-Madison student union, new grad student Joyce Carol Oates met Ray Smith, an older student about to finish his PhD work on Swift. He asked her to dinner, and they saw … Continue reading
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
Ever since the summer I’ve been meaning to write about The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, but my feelings about it are so mixed that it’s hard to say something coherent. The Windup Girl is science fiction geared to the … Continue reading
Ye’re nae unco gleg at the leapin, me Whiggy!
As a child I read a few of what must have been considered classics for boys–this would be when I was 8 or 9, before I had become absorbed in my older siblings’ copies of The Godfather and Fear of Flying. I … Continue reading
Posted in fiction, Uncategorized
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Not without mustard
In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Henry VIII asks his consigliere Thomas Cromwell about his ancestry. Cromwell was what Simon Schama calls a Putney cleverdick, a blacksmith’s son who had risen to a position of power on the strength of his intelligence … Continue reading
It’s the dreams that have gotten small
As you probably know, most of Inception takes place in dreams. At one point, during a gun battle with the dreamer’s security forces, Leo DiCaprio’s gun isn’t having the desired impact. His British colleague tells him to use a little imagination, and to … Continue reading
Six degrees of reincarnation
I’ve recently read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlass and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and they have reminded me how much our expectations shape our experience of reading. Cloud Atlas is a palindrome novel of six nested stories–that is, … Continue reading
