Adam Kotsko is a professor at Shimer College in Chicago. He has written both academic theology and books on pop culture, including Awkwardness, which uses works including The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Knocked Up to examine the fundamentally social – and fundamentally awkward – nature of human existence. Kotsko is also the translator of Italian philosopher and historian Georgio Agamben, a regular blogger and tweeter of sardonic quips. [read full interview]
Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted
reviewed by Sara D'Arcy
Fifty years after her suicide and posthumous fame, Sylvia Plath continues to be caricatured, to put it bluntly, as a morbid poetess with an Electra Complex who was finally driven to suicide by her husband’s adultery. Andrew Wilson’s opportune biography, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted, offers a startlingly fresh perspective on the life of Sylvia Plath as he attempts to debunk the myths that have enshrouded her life and suicide while remaining true to Plath’s... [read more]
In a charmingly honest postscript Matt Haig explains why he wrote The Humans, his fifth novel: ‘I first had the idea of writing this story in 2000, when I was in the grips of a panic disorder. Back then, human life felt as strange for me as it does for the unnamed narrator … I imagined writing it for myself, or someone in a similar state. I was trying to offer a map, but also to cheer that someone up.’
The novel is told from the perspective of an unnamed alien who has been sent to... [read more]
Jonathan Wilson, The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper
reviewed by Joe Kennedy
Albert Camus used to be a goalkeeper. It’s the one thing fans of existentialist philosophy know about football, and the one thing fans of football know about existentialist philosophy, right? There’s football and there’s thought and never the twain shall meet, unless Nick Hornby’s there to swan around giving the impression that he’s some kind of matchmaker, demonstrating that there’s nothing wrong with hollering ‘You’re Going Home in a Fucking Ambulance’ as long as you cue up... [read more]
At one point in JM Coetzee’s new novel, the worried Simón finds ‘the boy’ that is and is not his son watching Mickey Mouse on the telly in the apartment of a rival father-figure, the disreputable Daga. The dog in this fictionalised version of the Disney cartoon we know as Pluto is here renamed ‘Plato’, a funny yet disconcerting switch upon which the laconic narrator characteristically neglects to remark. The slight change of the vowel, which effects the replacement of one improbable... [read more]
Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker & Christian Weikop (eds.), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. III: Europe, 1880–1940
reviewed by Louis Goddard
One of the first places ever to publish my writing was The Morning News, a venerable online magazine that has been running in various forms since 1999. Before a major redesign in 2011, the site’s About page included an epigraph of sorts, a quote from Woody Allen’s classic 1979 comedy Manhattan: ‘I was going to a do a piece on Sol [LeWitt] for Insight—do you know that magazine? It’s one of those little magazines. I mean, they’re such schmucks up there, really mired in ’30s... [read more]
The title of Ulrich Beck’s latest sociological tract is a raw provocation. At once a diagnosis, a description, a prediction and a challenge, the highly charged image succinctly distils a media zeitgeist debated daily among the plethora of Europe’s increasingly differentiated dinner party sects. It is self-consciously paradoxical, unashamedly emotive and charged with a bluntness that was always going to bring colour to the cheeks of certain light-footed liberal commentators who have... [read more]
Idiopathy, the debut novel from Sam Byers, is billed as a novel of ‘love, narcissism and ailing cattle', a golden triangle of depth, surface and wit. I wonder if it is really of any of these things, or if it is really a novel about an integral lack, about characters locked into the frameworks of their lives, desperately searching themselves for a subject.
The book is worked up from the short story 'Some Other Katherine', originally published by Granta in their Spring issue of 2012. It... [read more]
Readers of George Saunders’ first and most brilliant short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Random House, 1996), will be familiar with the strange spectacles of artifice and corporate cultivations of reality that compose his debut version of modern America, in which the approximated and poorly-rehearsed gimmick of the real supplants the real itself. In his most recent work, Tenth of December, only the remnants of this world remain. Less concerned with the miscarriage of good... [read more]
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
reviewed by Marc Farrant
Fredric Jameson, now 78, is undoubtedly the leading Marxist critic in North America, and has carried this mantle since at least the publication of The Political Unconscious in 1981. Arguably, however, Jameson is most well-known for the publication (originally in essay form) of Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991). Jameson's theorisation of postmodernism as the lived experience of late capitalism - of the time of a ‘perpetual present’ - has... [read more]
Judith Butler & Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political
reviewed by Sarah Keenan
I had high hopes for this book. Iconic critical theorist and public intellectual Judith Butler teaming up with exciting young feminist theorist Athena Athanasiou to work towards an understanding of dispossession beyond the logic of possession. That is, to seek an understanding of, and take a normative stance in relation to urgent political issues of dispossession (such as forced migration, homelessness, foreclosures, and extreme disparities in wealth) without resorting to an argument that... [read more]
