TMO Tags: american authors
Paint it Red
Monday, September 22nd, 2008“‘Modern art is actually a means of espionage. … If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.’” This is not the paranoid ravings of some modern-day war on terror nut. It is quoted in Who Paid the Piper? The [...]
David Foster Wallace
Monday, September 15th, 2008Sad news was reported on Friday, that American writer David Foster Wallace has apparently comitted suicide, at the age of 46. TMO’s very own Shane Barry wrote two perceptive pieces on DFW back in January 2006 (link), approaching the American writer’s work with caution through his collection of stories Oblivion. We reprint the second piece [...]
George and Martha by Karen Finley
Friday, September 5th, 2008I feel more than a little sullied, having finished George and Martha by Karen Finley, and I’ve a feeling that this is one of the desired effects by the author as she pits George W. Bush and Martha Stewart as fictional acerbic lovers holed up in a motel attempting to pleasure themselves in oedipal hi-jinks. [...]
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits – Laila Lalami interview
Monday, September 1st, 2008Hopes and dreams are the stuff of calculations, and conditional clauses; if I do x, then hopefully y will come my way. For the characters in Laila Lalami’s elegant novel Hope and other dangerous pursuits hopes and dreams have another more fundamental element – geography. All the calculations and aspirations of the characters rest on [...]
Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem
Friday, August 29th, 2008Never judge a book by its cover. Sage advice, but what about its title? I approached Jonathan Lethem’s slim short-story collection Men and Cartoons less than enthusiastically, resigned to reading it because it was a) a gift, and b) short. The problem? The title, plus the promise that more than one story would concern itself with superherose, [...]
DFW I
Sunday, January 29th, 2006Just as the hysterical claims that the Sheffield outfit has already surpassed The Beatles in musical achievement have the paradoxical effect of making me never want to hear another track from the ‘world-beating album‘ by the Arctic Monkeys, so the assertions that David Foster Wallace is the best writer of his (our?) generation have ensured [...]
