Books
Propeller | 2013
Books 2013:
The Conventionalist
On the Floor and the Problem of Figurative Financial Language
"Financial writers are tasked with one of the steepest writing challenges possible. Yet the point remains: when faced with explaining financial machinations, financial writers too often fall into the habit of patronizing their readers. They fear bestowing too much complexity, opt instead for figurative language, and in doing so encourage the type of discrepancy in comprehension the financial industry would very much like to preserve." By Patrick McGinty
Aisles
Scouting Report:
Phil Jackson's Eleven Rings
"Jackson has convinced the basketball world that he is a practitioner of right-thinking Zen philosophies that, when understood and adopted by his players, unlock latent potentials in them that lead to championships. His real genius is that he has convinced himself of this." Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson. Review by Pete Tothero.
Mostly Novels
The Echo of a Moment:
Paul Auster's SUnset Park
"Auster moves from old to young, showcasing the way that thinking changes based not only on character, experience, and current events, but also age." By Emily Burns Morgan
Craft
Crossing the Distance: A Q&A with Alexis Smith, Author of Glaciers
"Maybe the point is not to square them—to explain away how suffering and death coexist with bliss and beauty—but to enter into the space between them, where the discomfort is, and interrogate it." Alexis Smith, author of the novel Glaciers, chats with Benjamin Craig about war, fiction, and the distance of experience.
The Conventionalist
How I Read and Why It's Humbling
"I want to believe that the impulse to compare comes from good intentions, that its by-product is not stereotype but instead a firmer understanding of fiction, yet it feels as though I'm discriminating in ways both good and bad. Maybe I know way less than I think." By Patrick McGinty
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Craft
"As Long as Your Ambition is About the Writing, You're Okay":
A Q&A with Nancy Zafris"If I hear about a lineman or a welder, say, who loves opera, I'm immediately interested in exploring that person—which is quite different from explaining that person." Mary Rechner chats with Nancy Zafris, author of the new story collection, The Home Jar. more
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Mostly Novels
The Stakes of the Game: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
By Emily Burns Morgan
"This is precisely what Schulz claims Gatsby bestows upon its readers: the chance to feel intellectually and ethically engaged with immorality while evading that immorality’s ambiguousness, and one’s own role in perpetuating it. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk does not allow its readers such ablution. By associating consumerism—of goods, services, entertainment, stories—with war, Fountain implicates every single one of us." more
Mostly Novels
Invisible Threads: Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
By Emily Burns Morgan
"Winterson does not appear to be suggesting that Bible stories equal fairytales. Instead, she's moving in the margins, figuring out if she can create a new text for her life while still holding on to the old one." more
Aisles
Bad Connections: The Novels of Renata Adler
"What if the social details and contexts that lead us to believe we 'know' a character are misleading, and are therefore the first things that should be stripped from a narrative?" Speedboat and Pitch Dark by Renata Adler. Review by Dan DeWeese. more
Book Notes
On Books from Matias Viegener, William Gass, & Teddy Wayne
Reviews of Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too, Gass's Middle C, and Wayne's The Love Song of Jonny Valentine. more
Mostly Novels
Trying to Go Further: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
By Emily Burns Morgan
The story of the Merry Pranksters, at least in Wolfe's telling of it, is less about drugs than you think, and more about the nature of leadership. more
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The Conventionalist
Rachel Kushner's Brilliant Connections
By Patrick McGinty
"Multiple storylines and plots, concerns on the personal, cultural, municipal, and global level: we weigh and handle these things with ease now, even more so when guided by a writer of Kushner's caliber." On Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers and whether James Wood has acclimated. more
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Aisles
Case Study of the After-the-Decline Everyman
By Jennifer Ruth
"Eggers does not insist that we care about Alan's predicament—the reader sometimes gets the impression that Alan himself wouldn't much care, were it not for his daughter's endangered future—but we do care. Alan is our after-the-decline Everyman." On A Hologram for the King. more
Aisles
Stories and Memories, But No Easy Solutions
"By telling her own stories through poetry that is both quiet and matter-of-fact, Read manages to capture the convergence of death and life that is ever present for all of us." Instructions for My Mother's Funeral by Laura Read. Review by Sarah Seybold. more
Aisles
The Awful Thing About Life is This
"Dybek seems to suggest that though there might be no bridging the gap between a father and a son, we still try, and we still make choices that attempt to shorten that distance." When Captain Flint was Still a Good Man by Nick Dybek. Review by Doug Cornett. more
Craft
In a Certain Tradition: A Q&A With Benjamin Lytal
"I think for people like Jim it's like when a hot air balloon lands and a bunch of people run over to wrestle it down and force all the air out and carefully fold it up. Except Jim's trying to do all that by himself." A Q&A with the author of A Map of Tulsa. more
Mostly Novels
Staking the Territory: Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room
By Emily Burns Morgan
Jacob's Room is only her third book, and in many ways it seems to be her own coming-of-age story. In a sense, this is where she lays out the questions that will occupy her for the rest of her writing life...more
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The Conventionalist
Living Past the End of the Myth: Anne Carson's Red Doc>
By Patrick McGinty
How did the media get to be like this? Why do we objectify the environment? The questions of the mythic characters are familiar because they're our own. We as readers should know the answers, but like the characters, we haven't 'got outside the circle of [our] mistakes.' more
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Aisles
Ripples Refract the Shell: Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies
By Benjamin Craig
Like all pointillism, no matter how fine the points, gaps remain. This is not realism, but not wholly abstract. It is an attempt that reveals all failures of articulation. And those are, finally, the meaning of the text. more
Mostly Novels
Family Tragicomic: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
By Emily Burns Morgan
As time goes on, the young Bechdel trusts less and less that what she observes is truth. To 'save time,' she invents a symbol to stand in for the phrase 'I think.' It's not long before entire entries are covered over with this symbol...more
Aisles
Raymond Queneau and the Pleasure of Discovery
By Alan Limnis
There are 99 exercises in the original collection, and ten more that Queneau suggested as substitutions or published elsewhere. The exercises read like flashes of light that illuminate for a moment the linguistic contraptions and conventions under the hood of any number of...more
Aisles
Slowly Removing the Realism: John Banville's Ancient Light
By Dan DeWeese
Banville's interest is in digging into a moment--an image, a feeling, a posture, a mood, or all of those things fused in a moment of resonant perception--and capturing it so well that we simply hunger for the next moment. His...more
Mostly Novels
Strange and Alienated: Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels
By Emily Burns Morgan
The word Thompson chooses to describe the Angels' underlying condition is perhaps ironic, given that it is a central term in the Marxist philosophy they abhor: alienation...more
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Two Trips Through:
Where Have All the Good Times Gone?
Building Stories by Chris Ware
Review by Alex BehrWare's drawing style is charming. His lines are antiseptically clean and evocative of a sterile, mostly safe Chicago. The characters have stiff poses, and their facial gestures are shown through minimal lines. I eased through the wordless panels, wondering how they would affect my mood, somewhat fearful of panic or gloom. They flew by like filmstrips on speed... more
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Building Stories
The Box of Forking Paths
Building Stories by Chris Ware
Review by Dan DeWeeseWare understands and uses a seemingly infinite number of ways of creating visual tension—this is a feast for readers interested in graphic design—but one thing design tensions can't produce is the insight a reader gets when seeing a character respond under stress, when something is, as they say in the narrative business... more
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Readings
A Writer Who Makes Readers Want to Write: George Saunders and Language as Participation
By Rachel Greben
Starved for the intellectual creativity that seemed to have ended the day I gave birth, I signed up for an art journalism class. And then one night that February, I read 'Al Roosten.' The story is not just an exercise in empathy, satire, language, or social commentary. Somehow, all these elements result in a feeling of recognition, which begets a budding kindness. more
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Aisles
Joy Castro: File Under "Strange, Urgent New Structures"
By Sarah Seybold
Instead of conforming to a "publisher's readymade packaging plans," Castro continues to bravely tell her stories. She writes, "I don't fit. I don't fit, and that's okay, and that's where I write from: that jagged, smashed place of edges and fragments and grief, of feeling lost, of perilous freedom. I extract small fragile bones from the sand, dust them off with my brush, and build strange, urgent new structures." more
The Conventionalist
Defying the Greeks and the British Middle Class: A.M. Homes'May We Be Forgiven
By Patrick McGinty
I realize that 'to segue from one scene to the next' sounds like a terribly generic description of how all narrative art functions, but few writers segue as quickly as Homes. Just as you're connecting...more
Mostly Novels
Marriage, Equality, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
By Emily Burns Morgan
Shakespeare and Austen are, for Woolf, examples of writers who have achieved this equilibrium. Charlotte Bronte is her example of one who has not. While I understand what Woolf means, I can't help disagreeing...more
Aisles
The Living and the Dead, Intermingling Gracefully in Pasadena
By Rachel Greben
Millet's interests here are the subterranean currents of love and attachment, and she is an expert at depicting the interplay of memory and shifting time in the real world. She conveys how learning to live with the dead is where an increasing...more
The Conventionalist
Truth, Nuance, and Times Genre Snobbery: Why Piazza's City of Refuge Deserves our Attention
By Patrick McGinty
Great works of art bear more resemblance than disparity. We...more
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The Conventionalist
The Best Books I Read in 2012...In the Month of December...That Reminded Me of The Conversations
By Patrick McGinty
I don't know much about film. I'm not sure whether I should be calling it “film” or “cinema” or “the movies.” What I do know is that one of the best books I've ever read about writing is, ostensibly, about film...more
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Mostly Novels
Strange and Alienated: Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels
By Emily Burns Morgan
"The difference between the student radicals and the Hells Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo." The word Thompson chooses to describe the Angels' underlying condition is perhaps ironic, given that it is a central term in the Marxist philosophy they abhor: alienation... more
Mostly Novels
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, 2000
By Emily Burns Morgan
The chronicler, Iris, acknowledges her own slack characterization of the men in her drama, but seems to feel this is not much of a problem. The men are not really the point, after all. The point is what happened to Iris and Laura...more
Short Work
In a Way That's Bearable: Alan Heathcock's Volt
By Chelsea Bieker
If there's one thing I love, it's a bunch of good, winding, layered, place-driven stories. I want to experience the desperation of history in short fiction, the calling of a cursed land reverberating through each character...more
Reading Lines
Paul Valery: "Perfume is what the flowers throw away"
By Wendy Bourgeois
I'd prefer to think of the inner me as vanilla ice cream, the same all the way to the bottom of the carton. One can predict the behavior of vanilla ice cream with a fair amount of certainty. On the other hand, thinking ourselves...more
Mostly Novels
The World According to Garp by John Irving, 1978
By Emily Burns Morgan
I met John Irving in college when he came to visit as part of my school’s reading series. About a week before the event, I received an invitation to a small...more