In a post at the Guardian's Books blog, Stuart Kelly argues that we have reached the end of the "genre wars" in criticism, although this has not yet fully registered with publishers and booksellers, who still cling to increasingly "irrelevant" distinctions among genres. Although I can't disagree with Kelly that few literary critics would want to "dismiss genre writing solely on the basis that it is genre writing," the very fact that "genre" is no longer a barrier to critical respectability (to the extent it ever was) makes his reasoning when accounting for the persistence of genre categories all the... Continue reading

Colin Marshall provides a very good introduction to the South Korean novelist Kim Young-ha, but in the midst of discussing the newly translated Black Flower, he suddenly informs us parenthetically that "I look forward to Korea's coming film adaptation of Your Republic is Calling You, but a cinematic version of Black Flower could do even better, with this high watermark of futility in its New Korea episode, assuming it finds the right director — Werner Herzog, for instance." This preoccupation with the film version, or the possibility of a film version, of a work of fiction has become very annoying... Continue reading

It appears there are still those in mainstream media and publishing worrying over the the dilution of "standards" in the era of the internet and of self-publishing. Alison Walsh at the Irish Independent is concerned that In the 'anyone can do it' age, it seems that all you have to do is join a creative writing group, or upload a short story on to one of many websites, or chat to your friends on author forums and hey, presto. But while writing courses can encourage a certain standard, can make you aware of point of view and plot development, can... Continue reading

D. G. Myers wants to know "what happened to literary history?" According to Myers, "Seven decades after John Crowe Ransom named the movement, the New Critics have achieved what they were after. . .The syllabus of nearly every English course is little more than a series of discrete texts which can’t be read historically because no one has any literary history." Although I agree that "undergraduates arrive at American universities notoriously ignorant of their cultural heritage," I certainly cannot agree that this is because for these students "no other conception of literature, if it is to be studied as literature,... Continue reading

A lot of people are rising into high dudgeon these days about the fact that most writers don't get paid for what they write. While this is partly related to the still-existing hysteria about the supposed nefarious effects of the internet (too many amateurs writing for fun), it nevertheless extends as well to fiction writers who seem to have just realized that, except for a few prominent novelists who have managed a degree of financial success, writers of "serious" fiction make little or no money at all from their writing. Various explanations are given for this situation, ranging from the... Continue reading

In 2008, Zadie Smith somewhat unexpectedly seemed to declare herself partial to the experimental impulse in fiction (as represented by Tom McCarthy), as opposed to "traditional" realism ("Two Paths for the Novel"). This was unexpected because, while some critics had mistakenly identified White Teeth, Smith's first novel, as somehow "postmodern," both it and Smith's two subsequent novels, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, were quite obviously themselves in the realist tradition, even recalling the very early stage of that tradition in 19th century novelists such as Dickens. Smith in her essay acknowledges her work's commitment to realism, affirming that it... Continue reading

The two primary modes or tendencies in Richard Ford's fiction are juxtaposed most prominently in The Sportswriter and Rock Springs, published in 1986 and 1987, respectively. Rock Springs is a collection of short stories set in the Western United States, in and around Great Falls, Montana in particular. The stories in the book evoke the relative desolation of this landscape where the prairie meets the mountains, reflecting the desolation in the lives of many of the characters. Although few of the stories rely heavily on plot in any melodramatic way, most of them do emphasize incident and event, related in... Continue reading

My review of Percival Everett's Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is now available at Full Stop. In Everett’s new book, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, that authority, the authority of the very narrative we are reading (to the extent we can unravel the narrative) is itself questioned, quite deliberately, as Everett takes storytelling, and fiction as a mode of storytelling, for targets of mockery. This quality in Everett’s work, which also characterizes such previous novels as Glyph and Erasure, is most frequently described as metafictional and postmodern, but I think the impulse behind it still best regarded as satirical rather... Continue reading

The books that brought A.M. Homes her initial notoriety (and her work did become rather notorious), the story collection The Safety of Objects (1990) and the novel The End of Alice (1996) are clearly designed to provoke, especially in their choice of subjects. The first story in The Safety of Objects, "Adults Alone," chronicles the increasing degradations of a married couple who take advantage of the temporary absence of their children to behave very badly indeed (including buying and smoking crack). In "Looking for Johnny," a young boy is kidnapped by a pedophile only to be released when he turns... Continue reading

My review of George Saunders's Tenth of December is now available at Full Stop: However much these particular stories depict characters facing extreme situations, they are otherwise describable as works of narrative realism. Even Saunders’s more radically surrealist stories do not really depart from the requisites of conventional storytelling, and in this his fiction is consistent with (probably one of the inspirations for) most of the neo-surrealist fiction that has become quite a noticeable development in recent American writing. . . Continue reading

I In a recent post at his Sentences blog, Wyatt Mason examines a passage from Robert Chandler's translation of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and enthuses over its wonders. Although Mason acknowledges that it is a translation, and rightly notes that without it we who have no Russian would have... Continue reading

This essay first appeared in The Quarterly Conversation In one way or another, the fiction of Orhan Pamuk is usually referred to as “postmodern.” A 2006 New York Times profile of Pamuk, for example describes his novels as including “a grab-bag of postmodern literary devices,” and its author, former Book... Continue reading

I Alain Robbe-Grillet begins his essay "From Realism to Reality" (in For a New Novel) with what must be a truism: All writers believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic, falsitical. . .Realism is not a theory, defined without ambiguity, which would permit us to... Continue reading

The novels of Elfreide Jelinek seem to me a conspicuous illustration of the limits of translation. Reviewers and critics favorable to her work tend to be familiar with it in its German versions, while those unfavorable tend to judge it based solely on the English translations available. While the former... Continue reading

According to Jonathan Gottschall, a critical proponent of what has come to be called "literary Darwinism": Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk... Continue reading

It seems to me that almost all of the reviewers who found fault with Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones--some of them quite harshly--failed to take sufficiently into account the effects and implications of its origin in the first-person narration of its protagonist. They made the mistake of imputing to the... Continue reading

(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.) Most discussions of Philippe Claudel’s fiction eventually identify Kafka as a likely influence, some even describing his narratives as “Kafkaesque.” If anything, The Investigation, the most recent of Claudel’s books to be translated into English, makes it unmistakably clear that such comparisons are... Continue reading

This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly) Though the recent attention given to such writers as Roberto Bolaño and Clarice Lispector has helped to broaden our perspective on the important contribution of Latin American fiction to postwar world literature, it’s likely that most readers continue to associate that contribution... Continue reading

For me, the most indispensable element in the aesthetic success of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is McCarthy's use of the novel's brain-damaged protagonist as its first-person narrator. Not only is this unnamed narrator's earnest but affectless voice crucial to the novel's cumulatively mesmerizing effect, but none of its other pleasures--its... Continue reading

In what is unfortunately one of the few available reviews of Rosalind Belben's impressive novel, Our Horses in Egypt, Stevie Davies calls it "a radical experiment in narrative." I think this is probably an overstatement, but there is certainly more going on in this novel, both structurally and stylistically, than... Continue reading

If I were to write a straight-up review of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach that expressed my honest reaction to the book, I actually couldn't improve on Steven Augustine's review: Ian McEwan is the gothic poet of British class anxiety. Over an arc of novels including The Innocent, Black Dog,... Continue reading

In his part history of Bulgarian literature/part survey of the career of contemporary Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, Dimiter Kenarov remarks that to appreciate Gospopdinov "one does not have to be Bulgarian, or to know the name of the Bulgarian president" and that his novel Natural Novel (Dalkey Archive) "has all... Continue reading

The Oulipian strategy behind Paul Griffiths' short novel Let Me Tell You (Reality Street) is made plain on the book's back cover: So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know.... These are the words of Ophelia at the beginning of this short novel:... Continue reading

Flaw This is how Polish writer Magdalena Tulli's novel, Flaw (Archipelago Books), begins: First will come the costumes. The tailor will supply them all wholesale. He'll select the designs off-handedly and, with a few snips of the shears, will summon to life a predictable repertoire of gestures. See--scraps of fabric... Continue reading

Most discussion of the work of Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld eventually focuses on Appelfeld's status as a "Holocaust writer," even if it is acknowledged that in his novels the deportation of European Jews to the death camps and to their murder there is not directly depicted, nor are the horrors... Continue reading