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The Conceptual Ambivalence of Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory
The Map and the Territory begins with the composition of a painting, but it's truer to say it emerges from out of the painting—or out of its description. A little more than a paragraph in, the fiction...
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A Large Wedge of Cheese: Peter Straub's Mrs. God
Peter Straub's new novel, Mrs. God, isn't entirely new. It first appeared as part of a longer work, Houses Without Doors. Then its title was prosaic and uninviting. Now it's so ludicrous it beckons you...
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A Revealing Letdown: Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New...
Paul Mason is a journalist for the BBC who wrote a blog post last February, just before Hosni Mubarak was taken out of power, called "Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere." It was meant to...
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Delicate Snacks: Matthew Forsythe's Jinchalo and Tom Gauld's Goliath
Two new comics, Matthew Forsythe's Jinchalo and Tom Gauld's Goliath, have come out from Drawn and Quarterly, both of which reinterpret ancient myths using a storytelling style that's cute and simple...
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A Successful Pastiche: Mike Mignola & Christopher Golden's Joe Golem and the...
Joe Golem and the Drowning City opens with that dreary old literary device: a portentous dream. But it grabs the reader all the same, because the dream is more a memory than a set of convenient symbols...
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Checkmate: Jennifer DuBois's A Partial History of Lost Causes
After her father's death from Huntington's-related causes, Irina Ellison, the sometime narrator of A Partial History of Lost Causes, roots through his old things and unearths a photocopy of a letter he...
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Problem Solution: Jordan Mintzer's James Gray
[James Gray will participate in a Q&A after a screening of We Own the Night tonight at the BAMcinématek, part of their "Brooklyn Close Up" series. For more information click here.] James Gray has...
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The No-Bullshit, Razor-Sharp Fun of Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise...
The Steel Seraglio flirts with the danger of Western authors appropriating Middle Eastern culture to patronizing ends—a criticism levelled at Craig Thompson's beautiful but flawed Habibi. But Mike,...
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This Is His Life: Jonathan Franzen's Farther Away
The latest in Jonathan Franzen's catalogue of long books with lonesome titles, Farther Away collects the author's magazine reporting, personal histories, and book reviews from the past 13 years and...
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Language As Body Horror: Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet
It's no hyperbole to say that language defines us as a species. It allows us to communicate on a level required to develop peculiarities like art, history, science, and religion, laying the way for our...
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Far from Home: Guy Delisle's Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City
A question for the history of the graphic novel: Will anyone ever write a cartoon equivalent of Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or For Whom the Bell Tolls? Will there ever be a...
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In Dreams: N.K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon
For a novel that features dreams so prominently, N.K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon rarely stays in them. But dreams loom large over the novel's city-state of Gujaareh. Here, Gatherers—followers of the...
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Self-Portraiture As Landscape: Édouard Levé's Autoportrait
In 2002, the French photographer Édouard Levé travelled to the United States to collect material for his photography series Amérique. Limiting his project in chance-procedural fashion, Levé gathered...
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God of War: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities
Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities is the best kind of young adult novel: one that can't be immediately identified as one. It respects the maturity of its younger audiences, while catering equally...
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A Meticulously Curated Artifact: Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin
Stan Sakai is one of the most quietly prolific comics creators in the business. Having trudged down the Way of Self-Reliance with his creation Miyamoto Usagi for 25 years, he trails a devoted fanbase...
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Charles Yu Says Sorry Please Thank You
Most of the writing in the new short-story collection by Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You, is either narrated by or focuses on a lonesome, timid, self-conscious guy in his twenties or thirties who's...
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Closing the Distance: Walter Chaw's Miracle Mile
At one point in Miracle Mile, the first book-length work from Walter Chaw, the Film Freak Central critic writes about how his father's death shifted his perspective on things. Now, he tells us, "I...
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The Two Paths of the Novel: Zadie Smith's NW
It only makes sense that NW, the fourth novel by Zadie Smith, was anticipated more for its statements than its story. Rarely has an author's work been so paradigmed so soon, read and discussed less for...
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The Call of the Lizard Brain: Charles Burns's X'ed Out and The Hive
By explicitly referencing the colorful boys' adventures of Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, Charles Burns turns his latest works, X'ed Out and The Hive, into something of an intertextual puzzle box....
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Phoning It In: Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her
So you're sitting at a café reading a new, smutty, and not particularly enlightening short-story collection by Junot Díaz called This Is How You Lose Her. Four of the nine stories are written in the...
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