Results for “best fiction” 318 found
Caught my eye
1. The Selfish Gene, thirty years later, transcript and audio file.
2. Inside Man. I’ve been burned by Spike Lee movies too many, oh so many times, but this one is excellent. It is also a study in game theory and the value of meta-rationality. While we are on the topic, how did I forget Live and Let Die – the only good Roger Moore James Bond film — on my list of notable movies set in Louisiana?
3. Charles Murray on his new book and plan for welfare reform. An interesting idea, but can you say "time inconsistency" three times in a row fast?
4. James Surowiecki on why newspapers are not doomed.
5. Don’t expect too much from job retraining.
6. Steve Levitt’s Africa fact of the day, and yes it involves both sex and violence.
7. Stanislaw Lem passes away; could his Solaris be the best science fiction novel ever? Don’t forget the Tarkovsky film version either.
My favorite things Virginia
It feels like an eon since I have traveled, plus I have been at home with the sniffles and a nasty cough. So here goes:
1. Music: Right off the bat we are in trouble. Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News but she is overrated (overly mannered and too self-consciously pandering to the crowd). We do have Patsy Cline and Maybelle Carter, the latter was an awesome guitar player and a precursor of John Fahey, not to mention the mother of June Carter.
2. Writer: There is Willa Cather, William Styron, and the new Thomas Wolfe. Cather moved at age ten to Nebraska. Some of you might sneak Poe into the Virginia category, but in my mind he is too closely linked to Baltimore. If you count non-fiction, add Booker T. Washington to the list.
3. Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Person: I have to go with Helen Keller. If you choose her for "20 Questions," no one will hit upon her category.
4. Movie, set in. The first part of Silence of the Lambs is set in Quantico, Virginia. No Way Out, starring Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner, is set in DC and around the Pentagon.
5. Artist: Help! Can you do better than Sam Snead? George Caleb Bingham was born here, but I identify him with Missouri.
6. The Presidents. I’ll pick Washington as the best, simply because he had a successor, and Madison as the best political theorist. Jefferson’s writings bore me and Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst Presidents we have had.
The bottom line: Maybe you are impressed by the Presidents, but for a state so old, it makes a pretty thin showing. It has lacked a strong blues tradition, a major city, and has remained caught up in ideals of nobility and Confederacy.
The Great American Novel — my runners-up
1. Faulkner. He came close to winning. But which novel? Absalom, Absalom is the deepest and richest. But you need to read it at least twice in a row, and that makes it less of a story. Here is the first page. As I Lay Dying is the most enjoyable. Read it through once, without trying to understand it. Then read it through voice-by-voice. Then read it through again. Sound and the Fury and Light in August (Faulkner’s easiest major work) cannot be dismissed either.
2. Henry James – The Golden Bowl. Are you interested in Girardian doubles, the triangulation of desire, self-deception, the use of gifts to imprison, the mediation of desire through objects, and the dynamics of marriages? This was James’s last and best novel. For my taste Portrait of a Lady is static and stands too close to the Merchant Ivory tradition. Interestingly, I believe not one of you mentioned James in the comments thread.
3. Huckleberry Finn. It seems more Shakespearian each time I read it. Right now Yana is reading it and loving it.
A few comments: Fitzgerald is not quite there. I am tempted to count Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a novel, not a poem. Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Nabokov’s Pale Fire are close, although my wife will not let me treat the latter as an American novel. Philip Roth has many excellent novels but no one for me stands out. Only the first third of Gravity’s Rainbow is wonderful. I prefer Hemingway’s short fiction and most of all his sociological non-fiction on bullfighting. Bellow is excellent but I wonder how much his books will mean to people one hundred years from now. The dark horses you already have heard about.
What I’ve been reading
1. Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, by Fuchsia Dunlop. The other night I made a sauce with five chopped green onions, blended to a smooth paste with one tablespoon sichuan peppers (first dunked into hot water). Add three tablespoons chicken stock, one teaspoon light soy sauce, one and one half teaspoons sesame oil. Apply to cooked chicken. More generally, buy Chinese cooking wine and black (Chinese) vinegar and you are almost ready to go.
2. Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, seventh edition. This is not just a reference work, it is also the best book on jazz, period. The main drawback is a lack of material on Norwegian jazz, a recent interest of mine.
3. This NYT article on previously-covered Dana Schutz. Or try this article on nuns and the origins of reggae.
4. Recent books by Julian Barnes and Zadie Smith, while entertaining enough, won’t attract interest thirty years from now. Question: What is the optimal lag time before deciding a work of fiction is worth reading? Few novels require urgent reading, so how about fifteen years? Why do I violate this rule so regularly?
5. Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, by A. Zee. This unique book lives up to its subtitle; it teaches you how to make sense of Chinese characters, how the Chinese think about food, and how it all fits into a bigger picture.
Amazon.com to sell its own literature
Digital copies, written exclusively for the website, are avavilable for 49 cents apiece. These short pieces range from 2000 to 10,000 words. About sixty authors have signed up, including Danielle Steel. On Friday the bestselling title was Harry Dent’s "Bubble After Bubble in the Ongoing Bubble Boom: Oil Bursts, the Housing Bubble Fades and Now Stocks Emerge Into a Greater Bubble That Finally Ends in 2010."
Here is the story. Will this practice render short story compilations, or perhaps magazines of fiction, obsolete? As with iPod, won’t consumers prefer the unbundled units? Or does fiction differ by giving the editors and compilers a greater role in producing excitement and cache?
Addendum: Here is a good story on the marketing of ebooks, and one entrepreneurs who thinks the days of paper books are over.
My favorite things New Zealand
Having once spent a year living in Wellington, this one is easy:
1. Movie and movie director – Forget Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings, I’ll opt for Vincent Ward’s The Navigator, where a group of medieval peasants suddenly emerges in late twentieth century Auckland. Ward’s Map of the Human Heart might count as Canadian, but I love its surrealistic treatment of love and memory. What Dreams May Come is sappy in parts but has Robin Williams doing a serious take on Bergman and Dante, doesn’t that sound strange? Note that this category is especially strong – for instance Andrew Niccol directed the underrated Gattaca.
2. Music – The Kiwis have many good indie bands but Split Enz is the peak, buy their greatest hits. Otherwise I’ll nominate the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, if only for their name.
3. Fiction – Keri Hulme’s The Bone People or Janet Frame’s autobiography are both first-rate, catch the movie too.
4. Painter – Umm…things slow down a bit here. The obvious pick is Colin McCahon, here are some images. Here is my favorite, but I will admit some lameness in the category overall.
5. Food – Fish and chips is to New Zealand as barbecue is to Texas — tops in the world. The best places are owned by Greeks. New Zealand is also a first-rate locale for Malay, Cambodian, and Burmese cuisines.
6. City – Wellington is for me the single most beautiful city in the world, make sure you go to the lookout on Mount Victoria, here is alas only part of the panorama. Wellington is also full of lovely Victorian homes. I will Napier as an underrated second, here is some Art Deco, the city center was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1920s and rebuilt in that style.
The problem? I like New Zealanders so much, I wish there were many more of them. Here is a brief photo tour, if you haven’t already decided to go.
The World’s Banker
Then Suharto looked at [James] Wolfensohn. "You know, what you regard as corruption in your part of the world, we regard as family values."
That is from Sebastian Mallaby’s The World”s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. This study of Wolfensohn is not only the best book on the World Bank, but it is one of the best books on both leadership and the economics and politics of bureaucracy. It is also the most biting critique of NGOs I have read, and oddly, the most convincing extant defense of the Bank. Here is Dan Drezner on the book.
I’ve also been reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, a fictional tale of Turkish secularization and religious opposition. I’ll cite Pamuk, Jose Saramago, and W.G. Sebald as the Continental writers of the last thirty years who will still be read fifty years from now.
Is Ayn Rand important?
No, I don’t mean historically, but rather as a thinker to read today. Bryan Caplan tells me this is the one hundredth anniversary of her birthday, so here are my bottom lines:
1. Her greatest strength: Her analysis of the mentality of resentment. She is, oddly, best as a sociologist, albeit in fictional settings. Wesley Mouch is a brilliant character in his loathesomeness. Her treatment of cocktail party conversations, while unintentional ridiculous parodies, also point to sad truths.
2. Her worst intellectual tendencies: The competition here is strong. One could list sheer dogmatism, a necessity to make everything black or white, or an unwillingness to read others carefully or charitably. More specifically, I will cite her tendency to redefine any favorable aspect of altruism as something other than altruism.
3. What do you really learn from her? Most of her formal philosophy is wrong or at the very least underargued. The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism — the greatest force for human good ever achieved — rely on the driving human desire to be excellent. I don’t know of any better celebration of that combination of forces.
4. Her quirkiest yet correct view: That landing on the moon was an intrinsically wonderful thing to do, and libertarian objections be damned.
5. Her quirkiest yet incorrect view: That Mickey Spillane was a titan of American literature.
Addendum: Here are Bryan’s bottom lines, which with I cannot agree. Try Alex also, directly above. Here is Steve Chapman on whether Rand has gone mainstream. Reason magazine weighs in too. And here isa humorous treatment of Rand on food.
Do MacArthur Awards stimulate genius?
As part of a program widely known as genius grants, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation most years gives one or more authors $500,000, hoping financial freedom will help the writers produce their best work.
An examination of the program, however, reveals that most of the 31 writers chosen since 1981 as MacArthur Fellows had already hit their artistic peak. That conclusion is supported by the 14 major awards – either a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award or PEN/Faulkner prize – and 37 minor awards the authors received before getting their MacArthur money.
Surveying book reviews, author profiles and the opinions of literary scholars, Crain’s determined that 88% of the MacArthur recipients wrote their greatest works before being recognized by the Chicago-based foundation. The sheer number of books produced by the writers declined, too, after their MacArthur awards.
It would reinforce romantic notions that great art requires personal sacrifice to suggest that, half-a-million dollars in hand, writers get lazy. But something else appears to account for the failure of the MacArthur program to fulfill its promise: Writers are mostly chosen too late in their careers, average age 48, and well after the literary establishment has recognized them for excellence.
Daniel Drezner offers further commentary. I see two options. Either the prizes stimulate genius by paying rewards ex post, or we would be better served by scattering smaller grants to a greater number of unknown writers. Ex ante subsidies do better than ex post prizes when the relevant creators are liquidity constrained. That is, without the upfront grant, a great but still obscure writer might have to drop out of the game for lack of money. Since that is a plausible description of the market for fiction, most prizes and grants in this area should take more chances. Tenured academics, in contrast, are not usually liquidity constrained (unless they have expensive lab bills); ex post prizes will work better for them.
That being said, it is easy to see why foundations — which involve accountability to a board of trustees — might prefer a more conservative approach. Yes a foundation may care about the world, but it must also support its own reputation, generate favorable publicity, and build a "ruling coalition" which reaps reputational awards from making quality grants. All of these factors will militate in favor of awards to established producers. When accountability is in place, who will opt for a very risky investment which fails in at least ninety percent of all cases?
Murakami and Kafka
The most important fact we gleaned from the records was that, medically speaking, the incident had caused no lasting impact on the children. From right after the event to the present day, the examination and tests consistently indicated no internal or external abnormalities. The children were leading healthy lives, just as they had before the incident. Detailed examinations revealed that several of the children had parasites, but nothing out of the ordinary…The one notable thing was that the two-hour span during which the children had been unconscious in the hills was erased from their memory. As if that part had been extracted in toto. Rather than a memory loss, it was more a memory lack.
That is from Haruki Murakami’s new Kafka on the Shore.
He is one of the few contemporary writers always worth reading. His Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is a minor (and neglected) classic of social science. Or do you love intellectual-geeky science fiction, but think you have run dry? Try his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The best "literary" introduction is probably A Wild Sheep Chase.
Books of the year
The Economist and The New York Times (password required) have put out their "best books of the year" lists. Each list is at the respective link, the common elements are:
Philip Roth – The Plot Against America
Anne Tyler – The Amateur Marriage
Colm Toibin – The Master
Alan Hollinghurst – Line of Beauty
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Orhan Pamuk – Snow
Moving on to non-fiction, we have:
Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton
Seymour Hersh – Chain of Command
The 9-11 Commission Report, and
Stephen Greenblatt – Will in the World
As for my favorites in fiction, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is my clear pick, with nods to Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro. For non-fiction, my memory summons up Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and Bart Schulz’s Henry Sidgwick: An Intellectual Biography. For science I’ll nominate Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos. I’m leaving off everything that has made our "Books we Recommend" list over the months.
My apologies if I forget your book. No, I haven’t forgotten its content (yet), I simply have no idea whether it came out this last year. Age has compressed my sense of time into two rather gross categories: "my plans for the future" and "the distant past."
Too Many Books?
This year’s Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction have now all been awarded for works I will never read, and next month’s National Book Award is certain to follow suit. Which causes me to wonder whether the world’s got enough books already. I own hundreds of novels that I will never have the time to read. If these were the only copies on earth and a fire destroyed half of them, my life would not be signifcantly impoverished.
Of course there are great novels that have brought me a lot of pleasure—most recently, Ian Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpostand Donna Tartt’s The Secret History come to mind—(warning! Do not read the Amazon reviews of Fingerpost; they give away the ending!). But the opportunity cost of reading a great novel is reading some other great novel, so if either of these had gone unwritten, I’d probably have some other wonderful book to recommend.
There’s an important economic point here: The vast rewards that go to successful novelists can grossly overstate the social value of their work. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has sold over 6 million copies and almost surely earned its author over $20 million. But if The Da Vinci Code hadn’t been written, some other now-unnoticed book might have taken its place as the blockbuster of the year, and readers would have been almost as happy.
Writing a book is not like growing an orange. If you grow the best orange in the world, the second best orange still gets eaten. But if you write the best book in the world, the second best book loses a lot of readers. So the market price of an orange is an excellent reflection of its true social value, whereas the bulk of Dan Brown’s $20 million is only an excellent reflection of what he was able to divert from some
other author to himself.
The Cultural Exception
The Louvre Museum yesterday swallowed its pride as it welcomed potential American benefactors for an inaugural official tour of paintings featured in Dan Brown’s best-selling thriller, The Da Vinci Code.
It is a telling concession to popular culture that reflects the intense financial pressure facing l’exception culturelle, the idea that France and the French language can hold their own against Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. Until now, the Louvre’s official position on The Da Vinci Code had been disdainful. “None of our curators will talk about the book. It’s a work of fiction and we don’t see it as our job to discuss it,” a press officer said last week.
Like many French museums, the Louvre, which only started seeking sponsorship last year, is running to catch up with its global rivals as it weans itself off state subsidies. Private sponsorship funds just 10-15 per cent of the Louvre’s €150m ($184m, £102m) annual budget.
As last year’s crisis in the system that funds France’s subsidised performing artists showed, the days of lavish state funding of the arts are over. The Louvre, on any given day, has to close up to 15 per cent of its display space for lack of staff…
Hosting yesterday’s Da Vinci Code tour for the American Friends of the Louvre, a new fund-raising body, Henri Loyrette, the museum’s director, said he wanted to dispel a reputation for “arrogance” and offer a warmer welcome to US tourists.
And get this:
“The big US museums have been able to build up huge endowments over the years, which allow them to fund virtually all their operating costs from the interest,” says Christophe Monin, head of fund-raising at the Louvre. “We are not so lucky [sic].”
The politics of Nobel Prizes
Jorge Luis Borges was one of the greatest writers never to win a Nobel Prize (try the early short fiction if you don’t already know his work). Now I know why:
The visit to [Pinochet’s] Chile finished off Borges’s chances of ever winning the Nobel Prize. That year, and for the remaining years of his life, his candidacy was opposed by a veteran member of the Nobel Prize committee, the socialist writer Arthur Lundkvist, a long-standing friend of the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda, who had received the Nobel Prize in 1971. Lundkvist would subsequently explain to Volodia Teitelboim, one of Borges’s biographers and a onetime chairman of the Chilean Communist Party, that he would never forgive Borges his public endorsement of General Pinochet’s regime.
Borges, it should be noted, did believe in democracy but thought Pinochet the best of the available options at the time. For purposes of contrast, consider the following (slightly overstated) description of Laureate Pablo Neruda:
On the eve of his [Neruda’s] death, in 1973, he could still describe Stalin as “that wise, tranquil Georgian”. His feelings were similarly soft for Mao’s China, where he loved to see everyone in those vast landscapes and streetscapes dressed in regulation blue.
The former quotation is from p.426 of Edwin Williamson’s excellent Borges: A Life.
How much time do workers spend on the Web?
“It feels both inaccurate and inadequate to describe The Office as a comedy. On a superficial level, it disdains all the conventions of television sitcoms: there are no punch lines, no jokes, no laugh tracks, and no cute happy endings. More profoundly, it’s not what we’re used to thinking of as funny. Most of the fervently devoted fan base watched with a discomfortingly thrilling combination of identification and mortification. The paradox is that its best moments are almost physically unwatchable. Set in the offices of a fictional British paper merchant, The Office is filmed in the style of a reality television show. The writing is subtle and deft, the acting wonderful, and the characters beautifully drawn: the cadaverous team leader Gareth (Mackenzie Crook); the monstrous sales rep, Chris Finch (Ralph Ineson); and the decent but long-suffering everyman Tim (Martin Freeman), whose ambition and imagination have been crushed out of him by the banality of the life he dreams uselessly of escaping. The show is stolen, as it was intended to be, by insufferable office manager David Brent, played by codirector-cowriter Ricky Gervais. Brent will become a name as emblematic for a particular kind of British grotesque as Basil Fawlty, but he is a deeper character. Fawlty is an exaggeration of reality, and therefore a safely comic figure. Brent is as appalling as only reality can be. –Andrew Mueller”
Yes you will find the anti-capitalist mentality in this show, but I doubt if few will walk away with a fervent belief in government planning as the proper response.