Stone Arabia is Dana Spiotta’s third novel. The time has come to call her one of our best writers. In Stone Arabia, a woman named Denise describes the slow deterioration of her family: her aging mother, daughter Ada, and her brother, a musician named Nik Worth, who rejects a career as a pop star to [...]
Author Archives: Adam Novy
Renee Gladman
December 22, 2010 – 4:28 pm
Event Factory, by Renee Gladman, is a devious little science fiction book about a woman who visits a fictional city called “Ravicka”—which may also be a planet—where only commonplace banalities occur and everyone is uncomfortable and mystified. It’s a reticent gem of poise and subtle humor, and, at only 126 pages, it punches—or, more accurately, [...]
O Fallen Angel
May 16, 2010 – 9:17 pm
O Fallen Angel (Chiasmus) is the first novel by Kate Zambreno, and, if she continues in this vein throughout her career, she’s going to start a lot of fights. The novel describes a older suburban woman named Mommy, her suicidal daughter Maggie, and a homeless and insane man named Malachi. The characters don’t have conversations, [...]
Fire At the End of the Rainbow
March 23, 2010 – 4:49 pm
Fire At the End of the Rainbow, the first book by Shawn Vandor, is a poised and unusual performance, an autobiography made of very brief chapters which eschew the typical surreality of short prose forms in favor of a less experimental, more vernacular directness. It begins with jokey pieces about men confronting men, but steadily [...]
Review: The Book of Jokes by Momus
June 21, 2009 – 1:29 am
At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions [...]
Review: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Camera
January 1, 2009 – 8:48 pm
Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Camera defies so many sacrosanct laws of fiction that the critic hardly knows where to start, but among its most disturbing propositions is the notion that narrative itself is a kind of overstatement, that turning points in life don’t actually exist, that life is nothing more than one bloody thing after another. Toussaint [...]
Review: Philip Roth’s Indignation
October 31, 2008 – 8:17 pm
At first, Philip Roth’s umpteenth novel Indignation seems a YouTube reel of familiar Rothian tropes: tradition-addled kids, annoying parents; Newark; prudes, shikses — yet it bears so many ancient grudges, so much destabilizing rage, that its fury makes it thrilling and unique. Like almost every Roth protagonist, Marcus Messner is the son of a Newark [...]
