March 2012
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February 2012
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January 2012
4 posts
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My Wand is Better Than Yours
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) D: David Yates S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman
There’s something not quite right in saying that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the popular film series based on J. K. Rowling’s ridiculously successful collection of seven children’s books about a mostly hapless boy...
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December 2011
2 posts
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November 2011
3 posts
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October 2011
2 posts
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September 2011
5 posts
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August 2011
4 posts
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Reunion — John Cheever
The New Yorker Fiction Podcast couldn’t have chosen a better specimen of short fiction for its inaugural episode. Aired on May 3, 2007, and hosted by The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, the episode featured Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford, then promoting his soon to be released in paperback novel, The Lay of the Land. Ford’s previous book was the short story...
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My Dog Tulip — J. R. Ackerley
For the most part of his adult life Joe Randolph Ackerley longed for what he called an “ideal friend”—or, rather, the Ideal Friend. An openly gay British writer and editor, he counted a number of fellow persons of letters, homosexuals, and men who were both among his friends. But none of them, to his dismay, seemed to fit the adjective. Not even E. M. Forster, his most distinguished...
July 2011
3 posts
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The Tales of Beedle the Bard — J. K. Rowling
Muggles—the vaguely derogatory term for “non-magical people”—are well-informed about the spirited acts of princes, princesses, and proletarian polliwogs who populate the fantasies of storytellers of yore such as Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whether through the original scrolls, through meliorative retellings like those in Angela...
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 —...
Harry, A History
D: David Yates S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes
Ten minutes into the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the then soon-to-be-eleven title character is scolded by his unsympathetic uncle for continuously and inexplicably—as though by magic—receiving letters by owl from an unmapped boarding school, letters which his uncle for some...
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Tumblr (iPhone App) — Tumblr, Inc.
A year and a half ago I reviewed version 1.0 of the official iPhone app for Tumblr, the popular microblogging (and hipster culture coverage) platform. In the interim, as the social media site continued to gain an astonishment of new users, the app underwent a few minor changes that necessitated increments in the minor numbers of the app’s version. But just recently the app was redesigned...
June 2011
2 posts
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The Classics (iPhone App) — Penguin Group USA
With the gradual but successful adoption of e-reading by bookish folk across the globe came the challenge for traditional publishers to level their marketing strategies at the newly established niche ruled by Nooks and Kindles and e-books and reading apps. A few publishers remain adamant in their devotion to publishing books in good old bound-paper form, but many companies have long allocated a...
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Ilustrado — Miguel Syjuco
Miguel Syjuco’s “official” Web site is a joke. Entering www.miguelsyjuco.com (a perfectly innocuous URL) on your browser’s address bar for the first time, you may be surprised seconds later to find neither the dynamic cleverness of an author Web site like Jennifer Egan’s nor the static simplicity of something like David Mitchell’s. Instead you’ll be...
May 2011
4 posts
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Icarus at the Edge of Time — Brian Greene
“Well, it looks like Einstein knew what he was talking about, after all,” begins an article published just over a week ago on the popular tech blog Engadget. The subject of the article is the recently concluded Gravity Probe B mission, which was carried out by NASA for six years to test the general theory of relativity described by Albert Einstein. The blog post, although...
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Please Look After Mom — Kyung-sook Shin
Oskar Schell, the lead character in Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, uses a rather quaint metaphor to describe something that makes him feel sad: “heavy boots,” as in, “I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I’m still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good...
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Mr. Thundermug — Cornelius Medvei
The dearth of baboons in popular culture is ground for belief that they’re not the most celebrated of all monkeys, let alone of all animals. Sure, there’s wise old Rafiki in Disney’s The Lion King. But aside from him, who else is there?
In its halcyon days of unbridled silliness in the 90s, Cartoon Network used to air I Am Weasel, an animated series whose title character, I....
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Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo — Will Self
One of the good introductions to Will Self’s often decidedly satirical style is Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo, a super-slim book containing two of his short stories. In the story from which the book’s title is derived, Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual, Self welcomes us to “the terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer” as experienced by Bill...
April 2011
8 posts
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“Bod’s heart sank. He took a deep breath, and did his best, squinching up...”
– The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
Session Notes for Chapter 4: The Witch’s Headstone
By now it should already be clear that for The Graveyard Book Gaiman not only recast the characters and title of Kipling’s The Jungle Book but also adopted its structure: that of a collection of...
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Bossypants — Tina Fey
Who said women aren’t funny? A lot of people, apparently, most of them men. One of these was Christopher Hitchens, the controversial journalist who published an essay in Vanity Fair titled, quite plainly, Why Women Aren’t Funny. To this and to the dozen other polemics written about the perceived humor gap between men and women, Tina Fey, in her new book called Bossypants, says,...
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“I am a Hound of God. I travel my own road, into Hell and out of it.”
– The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
Session Notes for Chapter 3: The Hounds of God
Silas, ever the man of mystery, temporarily leaves the now six-year-old Bod for a matter of great consequence and confidentiality and, honoring his promise to not let Bod be unprotected while he’s away when...
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“Well, you can’t stay here all your life. Can you? One day you’ll grow up and...”
– The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
Session Notes for Chapter 2: The New Friend
At the end of chapter 1, the child whose family was killed by a man with a dark (no doubt), undisclosed (understandably) motive literally crawls into a sanctuary in the form of—of all places—a cemetery. There he is...
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“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”
– The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
Session Notes for Chapter 1: How Nobody Came to the Graveyard
The jacket copy makes it clear that the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is a boy named Nobody Owens. This piece of information raises the question, What kind of parents would...
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The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories...
Half-oyster, half-boy, Oyster Boy is born to a perfectly human couple who supposedly conceived him after dining on “one spectatular dish- / a simmering stew of mollusks and fish.” Growing up, Oyster Boy, whose proper name is Sam but is sometimes called “that thing that looks like a clam,” becomes a laughingstock (“When the Thompson quadruplets espied him one day, / they called him a...
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Exercises in Style — Raymond Queneau
On Exercices de Style, considered his masterpiece and most influential work, Raymond Queneau said, “People have tried to see it as an attempt to demolish literature—that was not at all my intention. In any case my intention was merely to produce some exercises; the finished product may possibly act as a kind of rust-remover to literature to help to rid it of some of its scabs. If I’ve...
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03 — Jean-Christophe Valtat
Vaguely reminiscent of a more subdued version of Holden Caulfield, stripped of his colloquialisms and self-contradictions, or that of Alexander Portnoy, minus his off-the-charts libido and self-stimulation aided by a piece of liver, the nameless narrator of 03, French literary rock star Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novel of sorts, sketches a not dissimilar self-portrait of adolescent angst and...
March 2011
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From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E....
For his autumnal yet incandescent family tragicomedy, The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson drew inspiration from a handful of literary works remarkably possessed of whimsy and insightful wit. Chief among these is the late J. D. Salinger’s short but utterly perceptive book, Franny and Zooey, whose title characters are members of the Glass family, the basis for the dysfunctional Tenenbaums in...
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Hell Screen and The Spider's Thread — Ryunosuke...
Paperback, 80 pages Penguin Classics, 15 February 2011 Translated by Jay Rubin Available at Fully Booked
In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics, a diverse set of acclaimed novels and anthologies that over the years have been packaged and repackaged by the world’s leading trade publisher between distinctively expressive and sophisticated covers, a smaller set...
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Adjustment Team — Philip K. Dick
Short story, 8108 words Orbit Science Fiction, September-October 1954 Artwork by Jack Faragasso Included in Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick by Pantheon
A synopsis or a trailer for the new film titled The Adjustment Bureau reveals that Matt Damon plays David Norris, a US Senate candidate who serendipitously meets Elise Sallas, a ballerina played by Emily Blunt, and that together,...
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Kindle for iPhone — Amazon
Just recently Amazon released a major software update to its hugely popular, all-time number one bestelling product, the Kindle e-ink e-book e-reader. The update brought several new, much publicized features. With the new software version installed on your Kindle, you can now enjoy a new and easier layout for your magazine and newspaper subscriptions, you can immediately leave a rating and get...
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February 2011
6 posts
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Books Do Furnish An Apartment
Please don’t say ‘Have you read all these books?’ because then I’d have to kill you, and I don’t have any acid with which to dissolve the corpse in the bathtub. Or a bathtub.
That’s Dame Jessica Zafra, in hypothetical response to someone who, upon seeing the lot of books she keeps in her apartment, remarked, “You have a lot of books.” I, too, have a lot of books, and you,...
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Black Swan — Bruce Sterling
Kindle Edition, 532 KB 40k, 8 September 2010
Cover design by Roberto Grassilli
Also available at Smashwords
As deceptively inviting as its title may be, Bruce Sterling’s Black Swan is not the source material for Darren Aronofsky’s twisted tale of tutus. Nor is it a novelization of the Oscar-nominated film. Nor a novelette-ization, as it were.
Sterling’s novelette begins not...
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