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The recent rash of self-publishing success stories capture the spirit of the American Dream, in which anybody can be successful with entrepreneurship and a good idea – rags-to-riches stories in which the little guy, forgotten by corporate publishers succeeds on his own skill and perseverance. The response from other writers and publishers is often disdain toward self-published and vanity press books.
Slavoj Žižek has earned himself a reputation as something of a philosophical wild man, an epithet derived at least as much from the way he inhabits a room as it is from the content of his books. The crux of God in Pain is a good one, and although tempting to see it as a corrective to Hitchens and Dawkins-esque writings on atheism, the latter group is so thoroughly outweighed by the sheer force of Žižek’s brain that the comparison is sort of pointless.
Boyd is an immensely gifted and adroit writer, whose control of language places the reader immediately within the world of his characters. Over the years, his prose—always vivid and cinematic—has condensed to a sort of a crystalline purity, both elegant and lucid. Unfortunately, tension is undermined by a curious lack of events in the first third of the novel, along with the frequent appearance of secondary characters who add little beyond some local color.
Kathryn Harrison's latest novel, Enchantments, is interested again in fathers and daughters, but this time through the lens of history -- specifically, Tsarist Russia, the fall of the Romanovs, and the life of Rasputin’s daughter, Masha. Masha serves as the narrator of the novel, and she is positioned as both historical personage—Rasputin’s actual daughter—as well as the book’s embedded raconteur.
Peter Behrens’ first novel, The Law of Dreams, received the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and he has also published Night Driving, a collection of short stories. His prose is clear and lyrical, and he demonstrates a deep empathy for all of his characters. If the intensity of the early chapters of The O'Briens gives way to a less focused, more rambling account of the lives of the O’Brien clan, this may be as much a function of this type of novel as his conception and execution. But throughout, Behrens’ affinity for landscape and family shine through.
What do the “a-ha” moments in our minds mean, and where do they come from? The connections between art and science and the mystery of creativity have become the specialties of author and journalist Jonah Lehrer. What makes Lehrer stand out as a writer is that even while explaining the science behind a phenomenon such as creativity, he takes away none of its magic, and even as he acknowledges the complexity of his subject, he still illuminates it beautifully. Lehrer recently spoke with Highbrow Magazine.
Today, America has perhaps the largest, most vibrant, diverse and democratic poetry communities in the world. And despite the in-fighting, despite the poetry-apocalypse watchers who will have us believe poetry in America is a dying art – thanks to an abundance of MFA programs, small magazines, poetry websites, and poetry slams/open mics – it is apparent that such things are evidence to the dynamism and vitality of poetry in America.
Countless pages have been written about Nixon’s downfall, but novelist Thomas Mallon explores this episode through the prism of a multitude of characters caught in the scandal’s wake. Mallon sets himself a near-impossible goal—to write a novel about real-life people (some dead, some still living) who, by and large, lived on the fringes of this earthshaking event, and make it work.