America Agonistes - Sam Lipsyte’s ‘The Ask’
- Nick Terrell
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Picador. 296 pages. $Au 29.99
“Throughout my whole life I was constantly finding my place taken, perhaps because I did not look for my place where I should have done.” Turgenev - ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’
Who, in this age of late, post or undead capitalism is more superfluous than the aspiring artist? Who promises the least likely return, the lowest work-to-profit ratio and the highest likelihood of redundancy? With their seedling talents having barely pushed through the heavy sod, yet to produce any mature, robust or arresting foliage, the aspiring artist is always on the brink of nonentity. Ignored, ambitious, over-astute of every hierarchy of success, these are figures who cherish their marginalisation as the antecedent to rich rewards, while also deeply loathing it as the material evidence of their unrequited pretension. Read more
Durban Noir - Malla Nunn on ‘Let the Dead Lie’
- Nick Terrell
Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn
Pan Macmillan Australia. 392 pages. $Au 32.99
By the end of Malla Nunn’s first novel, A Beautiful Place to Die, Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper “had maligned the most powerful law-enforcement body in South Africa by delivering a letter to the mother of a black man wrongly accused of murdering an Afrikaner police captain.” In the letter Cooper had commiserated with the mother and explained that her innocent son had been beaten into a confession by the Security Branch. In the corrupt civil state of 1950s South Africa, Cooper is heavily burdened by his sense of moral duty. He is a dreamer. Read more
Une Petit Livre du Stooge – Seth Scriver
- Elizabeth Prater
Stooge Pile by Seth Scriver
A Petits Livres from Drawn & Quarterly
So we take a touch of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy’s cat, we slip in a semi-consciousness of Big Daddy Roth and Philip Guston, we bypass (but can’t ignore) Spongebob, Ren and Stimpy and a legion of bulbous co-fiends, we remember we are in Canada – doff our deerstalkers and don our lumberjack flannels – we cultivate the fuzzy, the flaccid and the wrinkled, we doodle a bit, we pull out the airbrush and go stoner mental, then we bundle it in a sack and sit on it. And we are enthroned, I would say, on a stooge pile. Read more
Northern Lightweight
- Jon Hurford
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
With the release of one film version, and another from Hollywood on the way, the only comment on any of Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ series that really matters is the one on the shelf at the store: ‘Re-order if stock drops below 20 units.’ Read more