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Search resuls for: "Sam Sacks"


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☆ ‘The Fraud’ Review: Zadie Smith’s Trial by Fiction
  + stars: | 2023-09-02 | by ( Sam Sacks | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
Tichborne’s grief-stricken mother immediately embraced this man as her son, despite major inconsistencies in his story. Tichborne had spoken fluent French; this man, whom investigators hired by others in the Tichborne family discovered to be an Australian butcher named Arthur Orton, didn’t know a word. Tichborne had been of average size; this man was enormously overweight. Even so, as the dispute was sensationalized by the press, public opinion became hotly divided along class lines, with many of London’s poor taking up Orton’s cause. The passionately debated trials that followed—first in civil court and then in criminal court, where Orton, by now a celebrity, was sentenced to prison for perjury—were among the lengthiest in the history of English law.
Persons: Tichborne, ’, Roger Tichborne, Arthur Orton, didn’t, —, Orton Locations: England, Australian
☆ Fiction: Siddhartha Deb’s ‘The Light at the End of the World’
  + stars: | 2023-06-02 | by ( Sam Sacks | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
It has been the contention of the critic Fredric Jameson that the traditional realist novel is a largely exhausted form and that, today, it is science fiction that sends out “more reliable information about the contemporary world.” I suspect that Prof. Jameson might look to support his claim with “The Light at the End of the World,” an extravagant, time-traveling novel by Siddhartha Deb that depicts India’s past and future through a constellation of occult secrets and malign conspiracies. This wild, often bewildering production unites two seemingly contradictory agendas. It engages in what the author calls a “gradual dissolving of the boundary between the fantastic and the real,” seaming its narrative with nightmares, hallucinations and monstrous psychological projections. But it is through the recurrence of the uncanny that Mr. Deb creates a coherent, interconnected vision of India’s history—and, if trends persist, of its history to come.
Persons: Fredric Jameson, Jameson, Siddhartha Deb, Deb
☆ Fiction: Isabella Hammad’s ‘Enter Ghost’
  + stars: | 2023-04-07 | by ( Sam Sacks | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
In 2012, German theater director Thomas Ostermeier staged a highly publicized Arabic-language performance of “Hamlet” in the West Bank. If this seems like a curious choice in the circumstances, it may be because Americans tend to think of the tragedy in familial and existential terms. It’s easy to forget that Hamlet is, as well as a grieving son, also a political subversive weighing whether to violently oppose a corrupt and unlawful government. For Palestinians, this aspect of the play was unmistakable. The novel’s narrator is 38-year-old Sonia Nasir, who was raised in an Arab family in Israel but has mostly lived in London, maintaining a career as a mid-tier stage actress.
☆ Fiction: ‘Biography of X’ by Catherine Lacey
  + stars: | 2023-03-17 | by ( Sam Sacks | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
By the time of her sudden death in 1996, X had achieved worldwide celebrity for her tireless transformations and the mystique they sustained. But one role remained unknown to the public: That of the wife to a largely ordinary woman named C.M. “Biography of X” is framed as Lucca’s book, written partly to correct the errors of unauthorized biography but mostly in an anguished effort to uncover the secrets of a woman with whom she was so intimate yet knew not at all. As the chapters recount Lucca’s interviews with the people whom X, under different guises, knew, loved and exploited through the decades, it describes a strangely mutated version of American history as well. The imagined details of the Great Disunion, as it’s called, yo-yo between the plausible and the preposterous (FDR chief-of-staff Emma Goldman?
☆ Fiction: ‘The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3’ by Kira Yarmysh
  + stars: | 2023-02-24 | by ( Sam Sacks | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
The prison in Kira Yarmysh’s “The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3” is not actually a prison but a detention center, and the women inside are considered offenders rather than criminals. Anya, the novel’s main character, is serving a 10-day sentence after being plucked at random from a crowd of protestors at a Moscow anticorruption rally. The detention center is unpleasant but hardly intolerable, and the cafeteria food is surprisingly tasty. Anya’s working-class bunkmates may share her disgust for the government, but they largely view activism as a bizarre pastime for the privileged. Mostly they’re trying to finagle as many cigarettes and hot showers as possible until the annoying interlude is behind them.
☆ The Year in Fiction: In a Stifling Atmosphere, Finding a Taste of Freedom
  + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Sam Sacks | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
In a trial that involved the testimony of Stephen King, federal prosecutors argued that further consolidation of the book industry would reduce competition, depress author payments and bring about a bleakly monocultural book market. But the unspoken reason the prosecutors convinced was that they described not some dystopian publishing future but simply an intensification of the way the business already works. As it stands, the Big Five book publishers, PRH and S&S among them, are responsible for roughly 80% of the U.S. book market. The demands of corporatization mean that an increasing amount of their activity is devoted to the generation and publicizing of bestsellers. The outlook begins to resemble a film industry monopolized by comic-book franchises.
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