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☆ Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-15 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In his candid, plain-spoken and gripping new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” Rushdie describes what happened next. That is long enough, Rushdie points out, to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including his favorite, No. And there’s a wound on the left side of my mouth, and there was one along my hairline too. That was the cruelest blow, and it was a deep wound. A doctor says, “You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”

Persons: ” Rushdie, Rushdie, reeks, “, ”, Ralph Lauren

☆ Heartbreak and Family Love on the International Booker Prize Shortlist
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-09 | by ( Alex Marshall | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A novel about a woman grieving her twin and another tracing North and South Korean history through a family of railway workers are among the six titles nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English. Translated from German by Michael Hofmann, Erpenbeck’s book is about a torrid affair between a student and a 50-something novelist in communist East Germany. Dwight Garner, reviewing “Kairos” for The New York Times, said it was a “beautiful bummer” of a novel, in which a reader could wallow. The other shortlisted titles include Itamar Vieira Junior’s “Crooked Plow,” translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz. Anderson Tepper, in a review for The New York Times, said that “Vieira provides a compelling vision of history’s downtrodden and neglected.”

Persons: Booker, Jenny Erpenbeck, Erpenbeck, “, ”, Michael Hofmann, Dwight Garner, Kairos, Itamar Vieira Junior’s, Johnny Lorenz, Anderson Tepper, “ Vieira Organizations: Booker Prize, The New York Times Locations: East Germany

☆ John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( Michael T. Kaufman | Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

John Barth, who, believing that the old literary conventions were exhausted, extended the limits of storytelling with imaginative and intricately woven novels like “The Sot-Weed Factor” and “Giles Goat-Boy,” died on Tuesday. His death was confirmed by Rachel Wallach, who works in communications at Johns Hopkins University, where Mr. Barth was an emeritus professor of English and creative writing. She said she did not have further details. Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.

Persons: John Barth, “ Giles, ”, Rachel Wallach, Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov Organizations: Johns Hopkins University

The bounty of hilarity published in the past 63 years made our task formidable and our criteria painfully limiting; we excluded many worthy nonfiction and short-story specialists. But we settled on a grouping that felt representative of the abundant varieties and evolving tastes of literary humorists, aware that some bits hit different now and others still slay decades later. Let us know what we snubbed, whose good names we’ve insulted with our criminal omissions. We’ll put your picks in a separate roundup — and in our reading queues. We won’t publish any part of your response without following up with you first.

Persons: hilarity, howls, we’ve, We’ll

When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is a bulwark against complacency and conformity, mediocrity and predictability. With all this in mind, we’ve put together a list of 22 of the funniest novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961). That book presented a voice that was fresh, liberated, angry and also funny — about something American novels hadn’t been funny about before: war.

Persons: Sheila Heti, we’ve, Joseph Heller’s “, John Yossarian, Bob Dylan Locations: Vietnam

☆ What Was The Village Voice?
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-12 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia RomanoTricia Romano’s oral history of The Village Voice, the most important alternative weekly of the 20th century, is a well-made disco ball of a book — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip. A lot of the people Romano interviewed, former Voice writers, editors, photographers, designers and cartoonists, will probably wince, at times, at the text. Humiliations are recalled; toes are trod upon; old hostilities have been kept warm, as if on little Sterno cans of pique. Founded in 1955 by a group of writers and editors that included Norman Mailer, The Voice was intended to be a newspaper for downtown, defined as below 14th Street in Manhattan. For many oddballs and lefties and malcontents out in America’s hinterlands (I was among them), finding their first copy of The Voice was more than eye-opening.

Persons: Tricia Romano Tricia Romano’s, Romano, Humiliations, Norman Mailer, ” Organizations: The, U.S . Postal Service, New York Post Locations: Manhattan, New York

☆ What It’s Like to Transition in Your Late 60s
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-03 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante“I want to change my sex,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1948. Now comes Lucy Sante with a memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” about transitioning in her late 60s from male to female. Sante worries too about her byline, her newly “dead” one, as if someone had shot it. At one point, she writes, she considered publishing a memoir that began: “This book is by Luc Sante, although it was written by Lucy Sante.” Yet here, happily, is Lucy entire. It is about Ferrell’s cross-country road trip with his best friend of 30 years who is transitioning.

Persons: Lucy Sante “, ” Patricia Highsmith, Lucy Sante, “, Sante, Luc Sante, Lucy entire, Will Ferrell, “ Will, Harper, Jada Yuan Organizations: Sundance Film, Washington Post Locations: New York, Washington

☆ The ABCs of Modern Life, According to Sheila Heti
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-29 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

ALPHABETICAL DIARIES, by Sheila Heti“No one at this point in history knows how to live, so we read biographies and memoirs, hoping to get some clues,” Sheila Heti writes in “Alphabetical Diaries,” her powerful and intimate new book. In “Alphabetical Diaries” Heti comes at this question slant, as Emily Dickinson advised truth tellers to do — so slant that you may feel you are in a ship that has been thrown sideways. The reader of “Alphabetical Diaries” will not be disappointed in this regard. Heti has done the really hard thinking about submission and its opposite. One four-letter word is zealously deployed in this book, and that word is not “love.”

Persons: Sheila Heti “, ” Sheila Heti, “ Don Quixote ”, ” Heti, Emily Dickinson, Rae Armantrout, ”, Christopher Hitchens, Martis Amis, Heti

☆ With Wit and Understatement, a Press Veteran Reflects on His Trade
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-22 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Trillin has long been more in demand as a eulogist, in Manhattan’s interlocking journalism and literary worlds, than probably anyone alive. He has a) a fundamental decency, b) a phlegmatic manner and c) a deadpan wit that delivers, like an inoculation, hurt and healing at the same time. nonfan might attend a Knicks game solely because he’d heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem. But it makes sense to have this material in one place, and this book is buoyant and crunchy from end to end. Trillin can be counted on to hand the world back clearer than it was before he picked it up.

Persons: Calvin Trillin, Ottessa Moshfegh, ”, Trillin, they’ve, nonfan, he’d, Chaka Khan, Edna Buchanan, Johnny Apple, Joe Bob Briggs — Organizations: Press, Knicks, The, Yorker, Miami, New York Times Locations: Texas

As I read Nikhil Krishnan’s “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” I wondered how he would pull it off. Here was a scholar, determined to bring to life a school of thought (hard to do) that revolved around finicky distinctions in language (extremely hard to do). The “linguistic” or “analytical” turn in philosophy resisted grand speculations about reality and truth. Krishnan admits that even he had a hard time warming up to his subject when he first encountered it as a philosophy student at Oxford. That discrepancy is also a preoccupation of one of my favorite books this year, “The Rigor of Angels,” by William Egginton.

Persons: Nikhil Krishnan’s “, ”, Krishnan, William Egginton, Egginton, Jorge Luis Borges, Werner Heisenberg, Immanuel Kant Organizations: Oxford, Johns Hopkins University Locations: Oxford, Argentine

☆ The Good Old Days of Book Publishing, Martinis and All
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-27 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

AMONG FRIENDS: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing and Bookselling in the 20th Century. Some of the most stressed-out young people in the United States, if movies can be believed, work in publishing. The young in publishing are acutely underpaid; some suffer from a broken-spirited servility; they fear they will never master the ninja techniques of literary social climbing. The older and more established in publishing have trod over a mountain of bodies to get where they are. Everyone is dowsing for a best seller, or wandering like Eeyore in search of his lost tail.

Persons: Janet Bukovinsky, —, John Le Carré, martinis, West, “ hydroponics, ” Organizations: Book Publishing, Buz, Ls Locations: United States, triplicate, ”

☆ A Wine Guide for a Changing World (for Better and for Worse)
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-21 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE WORLD IN A WINEGLASS: The Insider’s Guide to Artisanal, Sustainable, Extraordinary Wines to Drink Now, by Ray IsleWinery owners appear to lead charmed lives. So, too, do wine writers and critics, if their small talk and Instagram feeds can be believed. A lot of chateaus, grand vistas, infinity pools, delicate stemware and candlelit dinners in private rooms seem to be involved. Robert M. Parker Jr. changed wine criticism and wine sales in the 1980s by circumventing language altogether. Early in Ray Isle’s elephantine, hernia-inducing new guidebook, “The World in a Wineglass: The Insider’s Guide to Artisanal, Sustainable, Extraordinary Wines to Drink Now,” the author pauses to complain about the fruit-dependent tasting notes wine writers employ.

Persons: Ray, “, Pliny the Elder, James Thurber, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young, Robert M, Parker Jr, Robert Moses, Ray Isle’s elephantine Organizations: Ray Isle Winery, Yorker, Little League Locations: Ray Isle, Burgundy

☆ In the Early Days of Lockdown, a Writer Considers a Perplexing Age
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-30 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Playing with Eureka makes her melancholy, because “animals having fun can be a poignant spectacle — I suppose partly because it narrows the gap between us and them.”I can do without animals, most of the time, in novels. “When men appear in fiction now,” she writes, “it’s usually to be criticized or denounced for something. I meet the same paragon in book after book: high I.Q., great personality, firm moral purpose, dazzling wit. And the trick is to get across that she’s also very attractive without ever appearing to be somehow disrespecting her. Every novel is about aging, in a way, but Nunez is especially attuned to old age’s tender humiliations.

Persons: Nunez, Bette Davis’s, Elizabeth Taylor, “, Virginia Woolf, Robert Hughes, ”, ” Nunez Organizations: Eureka

☆ In J.M. Coetzee’s New Novel, Love Awakens an Austere Soul
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-11 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

THE POLE, by J.M. Coetzee’s novels are slim, and so, by and large, are his characters — they’re Modiglianis, not Boteros. The most wraithlike, a saintly hunger artist, is the protagonist of his novel “The Life and Times of Michael K,” which won the Booker Prize in 1983. When an ample person does show up in Coetzee’s work, moral stigma is often attached. Lurie takes her fleshiness as a sign she’s fled the strictures of civilized intellectual life.

Persons: J.M . Coetzee, J.M, — they’re, Michael K, John Lurie, ”, Lurie, she’s, Coetzee isn’t, Witold Walczykiewicz, I’ve, It’s, Witold, Hulked, Max von Sydow, “, Beatriz, Dante, She’s Organizations: South, Deutsche Grammophon Locations: She’s, Warsaw, Barcelona

☆ The Artist and Mystic Who Collected the World
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-14 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“Who is Harry Smith? Facts about his life, especially his early life, are hard to come by. He was one of the great downtown New York figures of the second half of the 20th century. He wandered the world as if it were his personal shoreline. Smith was an ambassador from the territory Greil Marcus has delineated as the “old, weird America.”

Persons: Harry Smith, John Szwed, ” John Szwed, “, Smith, Walker Evans, James Agee, Evans, billy, Patti Smith, Szwed, Greil Marcus, ” Organizations: Folk, Chelsea Hotel Locations: New York, flophouses

☆ August Wilson, a Theater Titan Who Spun Gold in Diners
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-07 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Mamet’s title came back to me while I was reading Patti Hartigan’s biography of another essential American playwright, August Wilson. Wilson, who died in 2005, spent so much time lingering in diners that “Writing in Restaurants” is a plausible alternative subtitle for Hartigan’s “August Wilson: A Life.”Wilson was a large, bearded man, often in tweeds and a pageboy cap. He’d sit in the back with a cup of coffee and an overflowing ashtray. As his fame grew, he’d find a place in each city where his plays were staged. It was his daily slice of experimental theater.

Persons: WILSON, Patti Hartigan, David Mamet, Patti Hartigan’s, August Wilson, Wilson, Hartigan’s “, ” Wilson, He’d, “, Arthur Treacher’s Fish, he’d Locations: ”, New York City, Boston, Seattle, Caffe Ladro

☆ A Poem About Dance and the Hard Work of Transcendence
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-04 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +37 min

)—achieved flight,that swift and serenemagnificence,before the earthremembered who we wereand brought us down. )—achieved flight,that swift and serenemagnificence,before the earthremembered who we wereand brought us down. )—achieved flight,that swift and serenemagnificence,before the earthremembered who we wereand brought us down. )—achieved flight,that swift and serenemagnificence,before the earthremembered who we wereand brought us down. )—achieved flight,that swift and serenemagnificence,before the earthremembered who we wereand brought us down.

Persons: Rita Dove, —, Paul Laurence Dunbar

☆ Stories Like Norman Rockwell Paintings, if Rockwell Painted Guillotines
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-24 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In one of the new stories, people become obsessed with climbing ladders until one fellow disappears into the sky. “Green” is about a town that gets rid of its lawns and trees, only to long for them back. From hints in his diary, it appears that he liked to lie on her stomach and make love to her navel. In another scene, a naked little woman slides down a large man’s ear, to apparently profound effect. Little things become fashionable.

Persons: Millhauser, “, Rod Serling, ”, Gulliver, Nicholson Baker, shuddering Organizations: “, People Locations: strolls

☆ After a Great Flood, a Struggle Between Faith and Reason
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-17 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Translated by Leri Price. The Syrian writer Khaled Khalifa’s novels have cruel titles, of the sort Jean Genet might have composed for William S. Burroughs, or Verlaine for Rimbaud. Khalifa, who was born near Aleppo in 1964, has published six novels in Arabic. He can also resemble Chaucer, for whom smell was indicative of a person’s moral state. This sense, so intimately linked to memory and desire, matters in fiction as it does in life.

Persons: Khaled Khalifa, Leri Price, Khaled Khalifa’s, Jean Genet, William S, Burroughs, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Khalifa, ”, antic, Philip Roth, Dickens, Chaucer Locations: Syrian, Aleppo, Syria

☆ In Milan Kundera’s Work, the Erotic Meets the Subversive
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Kundera’s humor had a deeper purpose. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. Kundera’s novels often felt essayistic; they were about whatever was on his mind: nostalgia, the absurdity of absolutes, music. Kundera saw sex as an act of redemption and of liberation under repressive regimes, but his obsession came back to haunt him. Geoff Dyer compared Kundera’s novels to the slapstick burlesque of “The Benny Hill Show,” with “the nurse in her bra and panties getting chased around by these horny doctors.”

Persons: “, ”, Philip Roth, Jonathan Rosen, ’, Kundera, Critics, Geoff Dyer, Kundera’s, Benny Hill Organizations: The New York, Communist Locations: Czechoslovakia, France

☆ Ann Beattie’s Stories Confront Charlottesville, a City Remade
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-10 | by ( Dwight Garner | More About Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

ONLOOKERS: Stories, by Ann BeattieThe Covid lockdown period already seems, as a subject, like a flattened corpse over which the whole of American culture and commentary has trampled. A case in point is “Onlookers,” Ann Beattie’s new collection of stories, her best in more than two decades. It takes as its subject Charlottesville, Va., a city remade by quarantine, population growth, new money and the fresh forces shaping American life. program at the University of Virginia, to personages such as Peter Taylor, Alison Lurie, Sam Shepard and Beattie herself. It’s where James Alan McPherson and John Casey discovered Breece D’J Pancake, and where Pancake took his own life.

Persons: Ann Beattie, ” Ann Beattie’s, ”, Peter Taylor, Alison Lurie, Sam Shepard, Beattie, It’s, James Alan McPherson, John Casey, Breece, Pancake, John Grisham Organizations: University of Virginia Locations: Charlottesville, Va

☆ Let’s Talk About the Bathroom Scene
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-26 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Alfred Hitchcock once told François Truffaut he wanted to make a film that would examine a city entirely through food and, unusually, waste. He would show the arrival of meat and produce into a metropolis, “its distribution, the selling, how it’s fixed up and absorbed. “Dish and pot, dish and pot, these are the poles,” his narrator says in “Malone Dies.” The dish, we discuss freely: Food, in literature and elsewhere, is part of what we talk about when we talk about culture. They are life, as much as sex is life — maybe more so, because people’s sex lives dwindle but this need does not. There is no defecatory equivalent of the inoffensive, neutral ‘sex.’” But we will do our best.

Persons: Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, ” Samuel Beckett, “ Malone, Milan Kundera, Rose George, ’ Locations: Milan

☆ Remembering Cormac McCarthy and Robert Gottlieb
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-23 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Last week was a somber one in the world of letters. June 13 saw the death of the great novelist Cormac McCarthy, author of “All the Pretty Horses,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” among many other acclaimed books. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with Dwight Garner about McCarthy’s work, and with Pamela Paul and Emily Eakin about Gottlieb’s life and legacy. “The two never worked together,” Cruz notes, “but it’s fascinating to imagine Gottlieb — who has argued with historian Robert Caro for half a century over punctuation marks — editing McCarthy, who rejected the use of quotation marks, semicolons and other such frippery. … I don’t know, maybe the two would have gotten along just fine.”We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general.

Persons: Cormac McCarthy, Bob Gottlieb, Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, John le Carré, Robert Caro, Lyndon B, Johnson, Gilbert Cruz, Dwight Garner, Pamela Paul, Emily Eakin, ” Cruz, Gottlieb —, McCarthy

☆ What It’s Like to Write an MLK Jr. Biography
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-16 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Jonathan Eig’s book “King: A Life” is the first comprehensive biography in decades of Martin Luther King Jr., drawing on reams of interviews and newly uncovered archival materials to paint a fuller picture of the civil rights leader than we have received before. “This is a very human, and quite humane, portrait,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. “I was a newspaper reporter for a long, long time — and you know, working on daily stories, if you got five days to work on a story, it was a luxury. It took me two years to find, even though I knew it was out there, this unpublished autobiography that Martin Luther King’s father wrote. So stuff like that just gets me really, really pumped up.”We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general.

Persons: Jonathan Eig’s, Martin Luther King Jr, Dwight Garner, “, Eig, Gilbert Cruz, I’ve, ” Eig, they’ve, Martin Luther King’s, Nobody

☆ Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-13 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that this son, John, had confirmed the death. Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books.

Persons: Cormac McCarthy, grotesques, ”, Knopf, John, scalpings, “, Thomas Pynchon, McCarthy Organizations: New York Times Locations: American, Santa Fe

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