It is a typical Harry Rent moment. The protagonist of Mark Sarvas’s well crafted novel Harry Revised is trapped - almost Bloom like - by indecision, in a bookshop where his task seems relatively simple: to buy the novel that will be his reference book for a much needed re-birth, Dumas’ The Count of Monte [...]
Imagine a 12 year old genius living on a ranch in Montana. He is a scientist and makes maps of everything from entymology to how to shake hands with God. As you might expect, he is, therefore, predictably weird and socially dysfunctional. Keeping his maps in rigorously colour-coded notebooks, Tecumseh Sparrow (yes this kid is [...]
There was virtually nothing I liked about Jim Dodge’s Fup when it arrived at my door. A blurb from the Independent on Sunday telling me ‘You’ll love it’, coupled with the sub-title ‘A modern fable’, had me close to shredding it with extreme prejudice.
Three things stopped me, though - the peculiarly grumpy looking duck on [...]
Sometimes I wish that, when buying a book in a book store, you were automatically given a complimentary title - that is to say, a book that will help you read the one you’ve just bought, as opposed to the ‘like this? you’ll love that’ recommendation.
For example, with Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, you’d [...]
The first story in John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, is set in Lisbon. The narrator, John, by chance meets his mother while walking the streets of the city. There are two peculiar things about this meeting - the first is that his mother has been dead for fifteen years, and the second is that [...]
‘You couldn’t make it up’, screams the tabloid tv presenter as he recounts the surreal situation of Santa Claus and his helper elves being threatened by angry families in a run-down amusement park in the cultural wilderness of Kent.
Far more entertaining, though starting from a similar run-down amusement park premise, is George Saunders brilliant Civilwarland [...]
Is Chuck Palahniuk one of America’s most underrated or overrated novelists? The answer to the question probably revolves around your attitude towards the shocking, because he is without doubt a novelist with the power to churn the stomach (although the reported faintings at readings of his short story ‘Guts’ seems exaggerated to me).
Speaking to Three [...]
Back in the ‘90s, I read Tobias Wolff’s memoirs of growing up in a struggling, single-parent family - This Boy’s Life (1989) - and of serving as a junior officer in the U.S. airborne division in Vietnam - In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of a Lost War (1994). I was impressed by both books, for the honesty [...]
“‘Modern art is actually a means of espionage. … If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.’” This is not the paranoid ravings of some modern-day war on terror nut. It is quoted in Who Paid the Piper? The [...]
Sad news was reported on Friday, that American writer David Foster Wallace has apparently comitted suicide, at the age of 46.
TMO’s very own Shane Barry wrote two perceptive pieces on DFW back in January 2006 (link), approaching the American writer’s work with caution through his collection of stories Oblivion.
We reprint the second piece here:
Two stories [...]
I feel more than a little sullied, having finished George and Martha by Karen Finley, and I’ve a feeling that this is one of the desired effects by the author as she pits George W. Bush and Martha Stewart as fictional acerbic lovers holed up in a motel attempting to pleasure themselves in oedipal hi-jinks.
It’s [...]
Never judge a book by its cover. Sage advice, but what about its title? I approached Jonathan Lethem’s slim short-story collection Men and Cartoons less than enthusiastically, resigned to reading it because it was a) a gift, and b) short.
The problem? The title, plus the promise that more than one story would concern itself with superherose, or [...]
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