“Summer’s Crossing”
27 February 2008
In this Modernist story of a person apart, Capote sends up the trope of rich girl searching, swerving off course. What does her in? Landing in the “exotic,” “intimate” worlds of Brooklyn Jews and Harlem blacks.
Review of Our Savage Neighbors
6 February 2008 | Philly Skyline
But Silver’s careful epistemology of fear and politics in early Pennsylvania — he evokes the “anti-Indian sublime” with great precision — could have easily been written about America post-9/11, a claim he artfully restrains himself from making. His is the story of the way fear is invented, declared, assigned, and broadcast — and then used to justify war.
“Return to Dar Al-Basha”
23 January 2008
This is an undulating poetic novel about the old city of Tunis. The main character Murtada, who Nasr addresses in the first, second, and third person, has returned to Tunis after a forty year absence. The city—or what happened to him as a child there—pushed him away. People are always running from cities, so this isn’t unusual.
“The Ghost Map”
15 January 2008
“New York City,” he writes in the epilogue to The Ghost Map, “is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.”
“Cosmopolitan Culture”
4 January 2008
She has ideas, typology, argument, terrific examples, wonderful detail founded in thorough research and here in Cosmopolitan Culture she makes her statement, so why has she abandoned the field?