Tag: novelists
Thinking About A.I. with StanisÅaw Lem
âWe are going to speak of the future,â the Polish writer StanisÅaw Lem wrote, in âSumma Technologiae,â from 1964, a series of essays, mostly on humanity and the evolution of technology. âYet isnât discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now?â Lem, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, is likely the most widely read writer of science fiction who is not particularly widely read
Leslie Marmon Silko Saw It Coming
When I called the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, in January, to arrange an interview, her son answered the phone. His mother was tending to a bird emergency, he explained. The next day, Silko told me, digressively and with relish, what had happened. She has a number of macaws, and she’d been nervous that one of them had suffered a stroke and was going to die. She brought the bird inside and propped him up on her bed,
„The Novelist’s Film“-Rezension: Hong Sang-soo macht es wieder
Kurz bevor ich mich für „The Novelist’s Film“ entschied, einen spannenden, fesselnden und schließlich bezaubernden neuen Film, der von Hong Sang-soo geschrieben und inszeniert wurde, konnte ich nicht anders, als durch eine Flut vertrauter Fragen zu kreisen: Wird dieser in Farbe oder in Schwarz sein? -und weiß? Wird der Protagonist ein Schriftsteller, Maler, Filmemacher oder Schauspieler sein? Wird sich die Geschichte (oder die Geschichten) streng linear entwickeln, nach der Hälfte abrupt den Reset-Knopf drücken oder andere sanfte Spiele mit der
Kate Atkinson’s Dark Dance with Genre
A new Kate Atkinson book is always an occasion for glee and a little trepidation, like a night out planned by a fun friend you don’t entirely trust. Atkinson operates in two distinct modes, both of which can be intoxicating. Half the time, she makes masterly use of familiar forms, as in her detective novels or her more recent foray into the spy thriller, displaying her trademark wit while hewing to the rules of genre. The rest of her books
When a Novel Reimagines a Nation
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The idea that novelists might partake in the project of nation-building by reimagining the past in order to create the possibility of a shared future dates back to at least Walter Scott. But some of the most artistically successful examples come from post-colonial Africa, where belief in the meaning of arbitrarily drawn borders can require an unusual stretch of the imagination. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, and
How Bernardine Evaristo Conquered British Literature
When the British author Bernardine Evaristo was in her early twenties, she and her drama-school friends would go to London’s theatres and heckle the performances. “It wouldn’t have been anything like ‘Rubbish!’ because it was a political heckling,” Evaristo, now sixty-two, told me recently. They would have been more likely to yell “Sexist!” or “Racist!” and then disappear, giddily, into the night. Recounting the habit this past December, Evaristo put on a mock posh accent and called it “appalling, appalling
The Case Against the Trauma Plot
It was on a train journey, from Richmond to Waterloo, that Virginia Woolf encountered the weeping woman. A pinched little thing, with her silent tears, she had no way of knowing that she was about to be enlisted into an argument about the fate of fiction. Woolf summoned her in the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” writing that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite”—a character who awakens the imagination. Unless the English novel
How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann’s Head
After “The South,” more Tóibín novels arrived in rapid succession. He told me that he has never experienced writer’s block. Initially, the novels offered variations on his Irish heritage, on the interplay between secrets and lies. In 1996, he published “The Story of the Night,” about a young man pinned down by his secret homosexuality and by the societal corruption of Argentina in the years of the junta. It was Tóibín’s first novel with a gay character. Three years later,