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Literary Arts
Being a Main Character
As a novelist, J.M. Coetzee has always been preoccupied with ideas, and in his best novels he has invented situations that work equally well as plot points and as a debate of those ideas. When Coetzee is on his game, his philosophical debates are so seamlessly entwined with the plot and dialog that his books read like tight, potent narratives. More
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Literary Arts
Defending Science Against A Rampaging Elephant
When Chris Mooney was a boy in the 70s his grandfather, a biologist, used to shake his head in disbelief at the transparent ruses of religious "creationists" who contrived attacks on the idea of evolution to insist that the earth was, as claimed in the Bible, only a few thousand years old. So-called "Creation scientists" would try to cast doubt on radioisotope dating, for example, or claim that evolution violated the second law of thermodynamics. More
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Literary Arts
Sorrow Strikes Again
The author that brought the egocentric Generation X to its feet, if only for the short time it took to read the 128 loaded pages of Night, has graced the American landscape with another of his thought-provoking tales of misery. Elie Wiesel's new novel, The Time of the Uprooted tells of despair rooted in solitude and, unlike some of his past works, Wiesel strays from the loaded narrative. More
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Literary Arts
Developing Your Inner Wildman
For librarians and bookstore staffers who have a hard time categorizing books, the Library of Congress provides help. Adrienne Brodeur's new novel, Man Camp, is filed thusly: number one: "Self-actualization (psychology)." The second is "Man-Woman relationships-fiction." The third is "New York-fiction." In this realm, she shares a place with other female novelists who, coincidentally or not, offer plugs for her book: "Sex and the City"'s Candace Bushnell and "chick lit" novelist Melissa Bank. More
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Literary Arts
A Memoir You May Outgrow
When feeling lofty, book jacket copywriters like to use the word bildingsroman to apply to a well-crafted book which is over 400 pages and paints a portrait (usually autobiographical) of the male arc of boy to man. We all know Thomas Mann deserved the word. Thomas Wolfe deserved it. The question is, does Sean Wilsey deserve it? More
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Literary Arts
An Engrossing Read and Heartfelt Novel
Kazuo Ishiguro has built his career out of books (The Remains of the Day, A Pale View of the Hills) with strange plots and equally strange characters. In the words of one critic, he has "mapped an aesthetic territory all his own," but despite his challenging novels and stylistic risks, Ishiguro has managed to win a wide readership that most novelists can only admire. More
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Literary Arts
The Nature of the Mind
Originally, Michael Guista's Brain Work was to be titled Brain Work: Stories in Search of a Soul. While I don't know the actual reason why the subtitle was dropped, I suspect that someone saw its deceptiveness: The stories themselves aren't looking for their own souls; rather, Guista is trying to uncover the essence of the soul that inhabits us all. More
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Literary Arts
Delectable Stories
Finding the work of a living, master storyteller can prove to be quite a task. I tend to picture our era sliding along the downward slope of a great literature curve. The human condition is universal, and as writers have been exposing it for hundreds of years, it's been expressed from every angle imaginable. Many of our contemporaries have made careers out of packaging yesterday's literature in attractive covers and passing it off as modern. More
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Literary Arts
The Lonely Shall Inherit the Earth
The characters that populate Gina Ochsner's second book of short stories, People I Wanted to Be, are troubled. They are troubled by death -- their own deaths, deaths they've caused, and deaths that have been inflicted upon them; and by their failings, their ennui and their inability to understand or envision their lives as anything other than what they are. They are fully realized people with all the imperfections and wonderful humanity that brings. The stories are, in a sense, escapist stories, for Ochsner creates a different world for her readers to inhabit for the ten, twenty, or thirty minutes it takes to read each. More
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Literary Arts
San Francisco's Two Nations
Reading "Winners" by Eric B. Martin, I was reminded of the "two nations" speech vice presidential candidate John Edwards used to truck out during campaign stops. Edwards maintained that the country is losing its middle class and polarizing into two nations (you could say "under God" depending on your red or blue state tidings). In Martin's book, the two nations sit under the seven by seven square foot umbrella of San Francisco circa 1999. It was a time when Elvis Costello playing at the company Christmas party was de rigueur while the south and southeast sectors of the city buckled under gentrification. More
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