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BOOKS
The Bling Is The Thing
Louisa Thomas 5/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
Clancy Martin knows a lot about lying. He comes by it honestly—he's now an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, specializing in 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy and business ethics, and he wrote his dissertation on deception. But he really learned how to lie in his youth, when he was a crackerjack jewelry salesman. Not as good as his brother, perhaps, but good enough to turn a fake Rolex into the real thing and money into the expression of love. "I do miss it," Martin admits. "I miss that feeling of being on the edge. Say what you will, there is something fun about deceiving people. It may be a sickness. Aristotle talks about it in the 'Nicomachean Ethics'."
BOOKS
Charlie’s Company
Malcolm Jones 5/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
It is hard to argue with author Randall Jarrell's wry definition of a novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." Novels can tackle events great or small, take place in the past, the future or the present—there are no rules, no definitions for which we can't find exceptions. And yes, even the great ones come with flaws, although those flaws are usually as varied and unexpected as the virtues. The most interesting novels, in fact, are the ones where the flaws and virtues can't be pulled apart. In that regard, Glen David Gold's new novel, "Sunnyside," is a most interesting book.
WORTH YOUR TIME
A Kitchen Confidential
Andrew Romano 4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
No experience is as universal as the loss of a loved one, which makes the memoir of grief an unusual, and often unappealing, literary genre. We know, of course, why the bereaved author has put pen to paper; he needs to cope. What we don't know is why we need to read his outpourings. Unless the sob story is both resonant and new, we might as well make do with our own ineluctable misery, thank you very much.
RECESSION
Happy Days Are Here Again
4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
In 2006, a grim little thriller called "Red Road" won the Cannes jury prize for Advance Party, a collective of Scottish, Danish and Irish production companies. It's not a lot of laughs. The film's main character, traumatized by the loss of her husband and son, spends her nights looking through a CCTV camera, monitoring a feral Glasgow housing project. One reviewer described it as "grainy, rasping and bleak." It stands to reason; Advance Party is the brainchild of Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker behind the Dogma 95 manifesto, which advocated a dark, minimalist style using handheld cameras and on-location shooting.
BOOKS
The Kiss of Death
Katie Baker 4/18/2009 12:00:00 AM
Shacking up with one's creative mentor—and then getting a book deal out of it—is such a cliché it's even spawned a literary genre: a mishmash of great-man biography and tell-all memoir, with a hint of Freudian conference paper thrown in. The specialty is nameless, but certain titles would be apt. The de Beauvoir. The Maynard. The Toklas (Gertrude Stein being the rare great woman to bed a protégé). Now it's time to add another name to the list: the Rackstraw. Loree Rackstraw was a 30-something single mother and Iowa Writers' Workshop student in 1965 when she met, and had a fling with, her fiction-workshop mentor, a then relatively unknown novelist named Kurt Von-
A LIFE IN...
Books: Kurt Andersen
4/11/2009 12:00:00 AM
2. "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe. It taught me that precision and hellbent inventiveness were entirely compatible.