Reviewed by Heidi Immesberger
Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is the engrossing and skillfully-written story of a woman who struggles to understand and to practice love in the aftermath of losing her infant daughter. In the months after her infant passed away, Emilia Greenleaf, an upper-class Manhattan attorney and the novel’s protagonist, struggles most to relate to her stepson, William. A bright and well-spoken five year old—perhaps unrealistically so—William challenges Emilia and places her in the line of fire of his intelligent, sophisticated, and angry ex-wife mother. The relationship between Carolyn and Emilia, carefully conducted through William and his father, Jack, is one of the best elements of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. (more…)
Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. This week: Tom McCarthy and Papercuts.
Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder, to be released in America on Tuesday by Vintage, is exemplarily contemporary, not least for its history, which is as unrepresentatively representative, and soon to be as well rehearsed, as, alas, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s. Written in 2001, and admired by British editors but rejected by their marketing departments, Remainder circulated with McCarthy in the British art world and made its way to Paris, where in 2005 it was published in an edition of 750 by Metronome, a press modelled after Olympia (or, more accurately, an art project reenacting Olympia’s Parisian lit-porn one-two). When well reviewed back home, Remainder was reprinted for the mass market by Alma, a British independent, but not before the majors had: come begging; fucked off. Vintage’s editor in chief, meanwhile, read Remainder in the last of its Metronome edition and fell hard, and he now brings it to the U.S. in paperback. (read more…)
Reviewed by Melissa Fish
The entire compendium of world literature and philosophy is sprinkled with conjectures as to what happens to people when they die, a universal question that has transcended culture and time. Kevin Brockmeier, in his novel The Brief History of the Dead, provides his own unique answer to this question by drawing particularly on African traditions and creating a place called the City, populated by those who have died but are remembered by those still living. The City parallels our own world in every possible way; its inhabitants eat, sleep, work, and speculate on the uncertainty of what will happen when they leave the City for the next stage of death. In an intriguing narrative style that serves to emphasize this parallel, Brockmeier alternates chapters about the City with chapters that take place in the living world, telling the story of Laura Byrd, a woman trapped alone in Antarctica, and her struggles to survive and escape.
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Reviewed by Ellen Wernecke
Something’s rotten in the state of corporation in Max Barry’s third novel Company. Sales assistant Jones has been recruited out of college to work for Zephyr, a busy and successful company which does… well, Jones isn’t sure, but he’s eager to find out. Rivalries stripe his new department of Training Sales, but all Jones knows is that he’s already earned the ire of his cubicle-mate, who hasn’t been promoted in five years.
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