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Literary Arts
A Celebration of Reflective Narrative
Autobiographical essays have long served as the fodder for comedy, and have made strides in their bounded-form comeback with the support of such cult deities as David Sedaris. Observing the lives of others is just much more interesting than living the one at hand, hence the dawn of reality television. The advent of such success has, unfortunately, contributed to marketable obsessions with developing formulae for everything, including the presentation of life. Fortunately for readers, the writers published in "Zyzzyva: the journal of West Coast writers and artists", have not yet been marred by commercial success. More
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Literary Arts
California Without Dreaming
"California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century" is a collection of short stories and novel chapters mixed in with essays, memoir chapters, interviews, and poems. The pieces -- which tend to be autobiographical or semi-autobiographical and by new writers -- progress in no apparent order, but the collection climaxes with a great poem by the famous Robinson Jeffers. It's about a Tassajara cave painting and it's called "Hands." More
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Literary Arts
A Serious, Solitary Introspection
I have yet to read the work of a modern writer that can capture the essence of outsider living quite like A.L. Kennedy. As an unofficial spokesperson for loners, she has exhibited literary genius once again with her new novel, Paradise. Here she delves into the life of alcoholism, exposing the troubles, grief and dependence that fuel the drive to imbibe. More
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Literary Arts
Framing 101
You pick up a book called, "Don't Think of an Elephant" by Berkeley based professor and cognitive linguist George Lakoff and you have an epiphany. You may have been born into a family of dogmatic conservatives but this book, subtitled, "The Essential Guide for Progressives", will help you to understand the political thought behind their positions so that you can have an actual debate. Or at least give it a good college try. More
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Literary Arts
Beyond Faith
A small town in Iowa, an old preacher awaiting death, the l950s, a family driven by zealotry, a prodigal son, a decrepit church, the Lord -- these are the raw materials of Marilynne Robinson's new novel Gilead. To many a 21st century Californian, this may well sound like a horse pill of a novel. That's certainly how it sounded to me. When esteemed critics endorsed it, I only glanced at their raves. Nor did I care that it took Robinson nearly twenty-five years to publish her second novel (after her extraordinarily rich but very different Housekeeping, from l981). Even the news that Gilead had been shortlisted for both the PEN/Faulkner award More
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Literary Arts
A Magical Break From The Real
Traversing the journey from child- to adulthood remains, arguably, the most common theme among past and present fiction, and has contributed to the canon of American literature such greats as 'Catcher in the Rye'. While timeless in nature, and explored to depths by generations of authors, you might never read a version that addresses the matter quite like Haruki Murakami's latest book, 'Kafka on the Shore'. More
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Literary Arts
A Great Read to Honor Black History Month
In 'Arc of Justice', Ohio State University history professor Kevin Boyle dramatizes the life of Ossian Sweet, an African American doctor who had the audacity in the 1920s to not only move his family into a White neighborhood but to shoot at a marauding, lynching crowd. His uprising resulted in the death of one man and the maiming of another. Boyle shows how this little-known case not only became another trophy for attorney Clarence Darrow, but a catalyst for the modern day NAACP. More
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Literary Arts
Humanizing the Myth
In spite of its scary New Age subtitle, this book is not a road trip to self-actualization, 16th-Century style. The author is a Harvard humanities professor, and as such, provides the reader with a context for Shakespeare's world as well as pertinent text analysis. Greenblatt's academic repertoire details how relevant court cases, the effect of the bubonic plague, the nuts and bolts of set construction, the vagrant life of the actor, and English status games all provided the backdrop for Shakespeare's works. More
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Literary Arts
Difficult Loves: First Novel Heavy on Sorrow and Scandal
The focus of 'The Last Song of Dusk', Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi's accomplished but uneven first novel, is love. Set in turn-of-the-century India, the book makes a very pragmatic and very severe appraisal of a force that can bring meaning to life yet also great pain. It ponders how love is produced, what it is for, and what is to be done when it alone is not enough. And most important of all it asks: is the best that love can bring worth the worst it will inflict? More
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Literary Arts
1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
At a time when every new book is billed as profound, earth-shattering, magical, and uproarious, Infinite Jest actually is. It's the rare book that actually lives up to its extraordinarily hyperbolic marketing hype. More
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