It feels like a cheat to reveal Beatlebone’s unfolding secret, or even the main character’s identity, and deprive readers of the surprises awaiting them within the pages of Kevin Barry’s second novel. There is the book’s cover—blowing its own cover, so to speak—featuring a silhouette of our hero, done up in the…
There is another, better book hidden inside Elvis Costello’s 670-page memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. That book is about Ross MacManus, the author’s father, whose presence looms large over this meandering, episodic sketch of a life that in many ways mimics the restlessness of the 61-year-old’s…
For Jonathan Franzen, form and function are inseparable: to write seriously about the human condition requires a big, important book. To tweet, text, skim, and scroll is to see a world that doesn’t have use for novels at all. Franzen uses the pages of Purity to excoriate the digital forces he sees threatening the form…
David Vann is one of the more curious creatures of American letters. He was born in Alaska, currently lives and teaches in England, is beloved by the French and Spanish (he was awarded both the Prix Medicis Étranger and the Premi Llibreter for his Legend Of A Suicide), and yet remains criminally under-read in the…
A note to idlers and procrastinators everywhere: The next time you think you don’t have the energy to “deal,” think of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French writer who wrote his memoir by using only his left eyelid. After suffering a massive stroke at the age of 44, the editor-in-chief of the French edition of Elle awoke…
In a book that’s partly about literal and metaphorical surfaces, it’s only fitting that the story should begin before our narrator utters a word. Tom McCarthy’s fourth novel (after Remainder, Men In Space, and C), Satin Island, depicts on its cover the words “treatise,” “essay,” “report,” “confession,” and…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
After publishing nearly 20 books, including novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and plays, Denis Johnson doesn’t get nearly the recognition he deserves for the sheer diversity of his work. He was bestowed with a National Book Award in 2007 for what many called “his big book,” Tree Of Smoke, a sprawling imagistic…
Martin Amis provides a clue—a few pages into the “Acknowledgments And Afterword” for his 15th novel, The Zone Of Interest—as to why this novel was written. The author points out, “He has so far gone unnamed in this book; but now I am obliged to type out the words ‘Adolf Hitler.’” He mentions that the man “seems…
Ian McEwan’s 13th novel, The Children Act, is so perfectly made, well-mannered, studied, and astute, any reader desperate for a story (or prose style) that illuminates or shocks could be forgiven for wanting, at times, to dash this tome on a hard surface as if it were a too-pretty English teapot. This is not a…
No one reads the novels of Stanley Elkin anymore, so it could be misconstrued as a kind of slight to claim that with Joshua Ferris’ third novel, To Rise Again At A Decent Hour, the author has fully arrived as Elkin’s heir apparent. Ferris’ most recent book is already being compared to the work of Woody Allen, Joseph…
Maybe the peripatetic nature of Alex Chilton’s life combined with his reluctance to be classified as a particular type of songwriter requires the kind of meticulous, exhaustive (and exhausting) biography Holly George-Warren has written. Even the full title is long and laborious, including too many qualifiers for an…
Blake Bailey’s remarkable memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait, is a reminder that the best books (fiction or otherwise) impart a sense of shared experience, and to read them is to participate in humanity, not retreat from it. Bailey has, by no means, cornered the market in terms of…
The question of where to begin with a review of Richard Powers’ 11th novel, Orfeo, is a complex one. Yet it parallels the question the book’s protagonist, Peter Els, must ask himself. He’s a 70-year-old retired adjunct professor of music, an avant-garde composer, and a self-taught hobbyist geneticist. Where to begin?
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Stoked for that probable genre masterpiece, I, Frankenstein? To tide you over, we’ve lined up a week of similarly… unconventional Frankenstein movies.
The titular Andrew is on his ex-wife’s doorstep, listening to her new husband cut him down to size:
This year, The A.V. Club invited our regular book writers and staff to pick their favorite books released in 2013. Since very few of us read the same books, a ballot system wouldn’t work as well. The A.V. Club works to cultivate an eclectic selection of tastes in books, and in our effort to do that, there isn’t much…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: The release of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire has us thinking back on other movies about dangerous games, deadly competitions, and blood sports.
Near the end of Robert Stone’s new novel, Death Of The Black-Haired Girl, Eddie Stack, reeling from the death of his daughter Maud (the titular subject with the raven-colored mane), barks, “What the fuck is my legacy?” For Stone, aged 76, whose career includes 11 books and a National Book Award (for Dog Soldiers),…
“The Bible celebrates many killings,” writes the nameless narrator of David Vann’s fourth novel, Goat Mountain. “Born into a world of butchery, a child of butchery will embrace butchery and find it normal,” he guesses. “I was a monster even before I was made into another kind of monster.”
