Literature
Green Piece—Barbara Kingsolver’s Eco Obsessions
Not Quite Stories—Alice Munro’s Almost Autobiography
LAST WEEK, Salon reported that Philip Roth is retiring from writing fiction by translating an interview from a French magazine. Roth’s publisher confirmed the author’s statement, but if they had not, it would not have been the first time that an author sighed loudly, expressed ennui, and led his attentive fans astray. READ MORE >>
The Professor: Jill Lepore's Fatal Flaw
Room for Improvement—Emma Donoghue’s Limp Short Stories
THE CONCEPT OF the “sophomore slump” haunts most popular media: the “one-hit wonder” pop singer unable to catch fire again, the movie franchise that disappoints on second outing. Literary artists seem no less susceptible to an inability to compound artistic triumph. Rather than underwhelm with a weak follow-up novel, though, the breakthrough novelist all too often regresses to the short story. READ MORE >>
The Poet Politician—Chinua Achebe’s Civil War
CHINUA ACHEBE’S FAMOUS first novel, Things Fall Apart, conspicuously borrows from Yeats. The memoir with which he bookends his long career, There Was a Country, is a far more literal explanation of what happens when “the center cannot hold.” READ MORE >>
