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Brandon Taylor: On D.H. Lawrence & moral fiction

“It all sounds very abstract, I know. But for me, it comes down to this: moral fiction is not fiction that affirms your ideology about power systems and oppression. It does not make you feel like a good and righteous person. It may have no lessons for you to tweet about or put on Instagram or explain readily, wittily at dinner parties. You can’t wear it like a hair shirt and you can’t always articulate its particular force or power upon you. Moral art is, I think, hard to describe. Instable. It is art that implicates and complicates your notions of good and bad. Moral art may call you a liar to your face. It reveals the shallowness of your thought. It challenges you, but not in the way of an all-fiber diet. In the way gravity challenges you. In the way the thin air at the top of a mountain challenges you. In the way the pressure of the deep seas challenges you. Moral does not mean good or lawful. Moral means true. Moral means you take your finger off the scale.

“To make moral art, moral fiction, is to get out of the way. To make moral art is to admit one’s humble place in the order of things. I think moral fiction is less about signaling to the reader that you voted for the right people or that you are able to listen to people who would have you destroyed. Moral fiction does not signal. That is propaganda. That is social work. Not that these are unimportant things, but they are not art. And they are not moral.”

#moral fiction #brandon taylor #d.h. lawrence #moral art

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13 days ago as a National Book Critics Circle voting member I
submitted my ballot on which I nominated six first books for
NBCC’s John Leonard Prize for a First Book. Any book published
in 2020 that is its author’s first published book is eligible. This
year I read 36 first books of varying genres, but all six books I
nominated are debut novels (in previous years I’ve also nominated
poetry, short story, essay collections and memoirs for the Leonard Prize). Here
are my picks in alphabetical order by author’s surname:

These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card

Little Gods by Meng Jin

Luster by Raven Leilani

Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata
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As a voting National Book Critics Circle member I cast my ballot (electronically) last week nominating five 2019 first books for the John Leonard Prize. Any eligible 2019 first book that gets 20% of the member votes will become a finalist. My five include two debut short story collections and three debut novels:

The two debut short story collections are about young adults from marginalized communities: black, Latinx, and/or lgbtq Houston residentss in Lot by Bryan Washington, and Indian, Indian-American, and/or lgbtq characters in America and India both in the present day and earlier eras in White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar.

Ayşegül Savaş's debut novel Walking on the Ceiling features its first person narrator's interior monologue set mostly in Paris where she moves following her mother's passing but also in her native Istanbul from which she grows increasingly distant and disconnected the longer she lives in Paris, and as the political situation at home makes a return risky.

The other two debut novels also feature young women who run away as a response to grief for a parent. In Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field a young Bangalore woman with a post-graduate degree and a coveted job in a technology company leaves all that (and her father) behind to travel to the Indian part of Kashmir that is under martial law hoping to find the Kashmiri door to door salesman whom her late mother befriended. In Amanda Goldblatt's Hard Mouth the first person narrator is a lab technician in the Washington, DC suburbs who overcome by her terminally ill father's final illness flees to a remote mountaintop cabin, and the novel's most engaging section becomes a wilderness survival story.

Lot and The Far Field have decent chances of becoming finalists. The other three books probably are not on enough of my fellow critics' radars.

All previous Leonard Prize winners have been works of prose fiction. Other 2019 debut fiction books I recommend include:

Such Good Work by Johannes Lichtman

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

The Falconer by Dana Czapnik

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari

Willa & Hesper by Amy Feltman

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

The Expectations by Alexander Tilney

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Golden Child by Claire Adam

Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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I'm taking a break from reading and reviewing new books to catch up with some old ones on my TBR list. I'm also trying to improve my Hebrew and am currently reading and enjoying the Hebrew edition of Ya'akov Shabtai's unfinished last novel סוף דבר (published in English as Past Perfect).



In circumstances when I cannot read with my eyes I read with my ears. I just finished listening to the audiobook of The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin, a writer of whom I became aware while reading his friend William H. Gass while preparing to review The William H. Gass Reader. My brief review of The Rabbi of Lud appears on Goodreads.







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“... readers will enjoy this funny, imaginative, and handsomely crafted novel first and foremost as a memorable work of literature, and as such it deserves to reach a wide audience.” -- From my review of Muck by Dror Burstein in New York Journal of Books
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"According to Gass a total aesthete reduces everything to style; the centrality of moral and ethical issues in his writing proves that Gass is not merely an aesthete. Whether or not they agree with him his readers will never be cognitively malnourished, and his poetic prose is a joy to read even when its vision is pessimistic." -- From my review of The William H. Gass Reader in New York Journal of Books
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"South African born Jewish-Canadian author Kenneth Bonert’s sophomore effort The Mandela Plot is a sequel to his multiple awards winning debut novel The Lion Seeker (also reviewed on NYJB) that continues the Helger family saga begun in the earlier volume in a rather dark combination coming of age story and political thriller. A concluding epilogue in the final fifth of the novel includes commentary on post-Apartheid South Africa in general and the predicament of its Jewish citizens in particular." -- From my review of The Mandela Plot by Kenneth Bonert in New York Journal of Books 







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"well written, masterfully translated by Jessica Cohen, and rewards rereading." -- From my review of The Diamond Setter by Moshe Sakal in New York Journal of Books








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"Petty Business, the second of Yirmi Pinkus’ five novels and the first to be published in English, satirically portrays the life of a family of Tel Aviv store owners with both fondness and humor over one year—1989, a time in which neighborhood mom and pop stores were being put out of business by larger chain and department stores, just as the latter are now under pressure from Internet vendors.

"... The novel’s title in the original Hebrew edition is the Aramaic phrase Bi’zer Anpin, which means 'on a small scale, in miniature,' and this family and their enterprises are a microcosm of a lower-middle class retail subculture at the end of an era.

"Overseas Pinkus is better known as cartoonist, and his book cover illustration of bathers in the waterpark swimming pool provides a preview of his satirical take on that subculture whose narrative portrait is also poignant. Pinkus’ mastery of language is every bit equal to that of his visual medium, and translators Evan Fallenberg and Yardena Greenspan do a fine job of conveying his varied prose into English." -- from my review of Petty Business by Yirmi Pinkus in New York Journal of Books

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"One of the lessons this complicated book conveys is how difficult it is to achieve the golden mean, balancing a serious writer’s need for solitude to reduce distractions with the need to stay connected and involved with one’s family and loved ones on the one hand, and integrating knowledge and appreciation for global culture with an intimate involvement with one’s particular tradition and civilization on the other. If the consequences of failing to achieve those balances are not as dire for most of us as they are for Andrew, nonetheless many of us would benefit from a closer examination and recalibration. Extending the metaphor on a national and international scale to include the 9/11 attack may seem like a stretch, or is it?" -- From my review of The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar in New York Journal of Books






The Ruined House book cover
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"One way to view these stories is as philosophical essays in fictional form that address some of the same philosophical, psychological, spiritual, aesthetic, cultural, and societal topics and concerns that are found in Bae’s longer fiction. But by devoting each story to only two or three of those topics and freed from a longer work’s overarching narrative the stories address those issues in even greater depth and convey them with poetic prose of comparable beauty to that found in her previous books in English translation. Compared to them this book has an even higher degree of difficulty—with abrupt linguistic changes in voice, number, and/or gender and multiple starting, stopping, and resuming narrative threads—that demand highly focused concentration but like them reward rereading." -- From my review of North Station by Bae Suah in New York Journal of Books
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"Though Moving Kings is considerably shorter and more accessible—with less erudite but nonetheless stimulating vocabulary, similes, and fewer stream of consciousness run-on sentences—than Cohen’s previous novel Book of Numbers (also reviewed on NYJB) it, too, skillfully weaves descriptive character portraits and plot lines into a novel of ideas that addresses issues as diverse as capitalism, gentrification, army veterans, the IDF’s conduct in the West Bank, and Jewish identity with sharp sardonic humor." -- from my review in New York Journal of Books



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Also see Lit Hub's interview with Cohen about the novel
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“like a sonnet whose beautiful lines are undermined by its flawed argument.” -- from my review of The Journal of Albion Midnight in New York Journal of Books






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Lerman’s sense of humor has been compared to that of Philip Roth (who is three years her senior), but in God’s Ear the humor also employs the traditional Jewish irony and Eastern European Jewish folklore of Isaac Bashevis Singer, especially his short stories. Most of Lerman’s Hasidic folktales in God’s Ear are too long to quote, but the following paragraph gives a taste of her wit:

“Totte, you hear about the old Jew who walked into the SS recruiting office before the war? He comes in half-blind, crippled, palsied. He goes up to the Nazi recruiter and says, ‘I just came in to tell you, on me you shouldn’t count.’” -- from my review of God's Ear by Rhoda Lerman in New York Journal of Books


Throughout the book one can’t help admiring Assadi’s handsome prose, such as this excerpt from a page long paragraph:

“Sometimes I cannot locate any one night as if my life in New York were but a flood of nights. An eternal room of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity, and the cab rides home, the drunken swipes of credit cards with fifteen-dollar balances behind drivers whose faces I never remembered come morning, dinners with Laura alone, Thai food, not finishing our plates, ordering more to drink, someone at the piano, someone holding the guitar, strumming chords, singing songs, concerts in the beginning, neon flashing, rich acquaintances in Soho lofts, next stop Williamsburgh, living in the dark, living in the night, making it through the day only to afford the night.” -- from my review of Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi in New York Journal of Books 

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"At first glance Israeli novelist David Grossman’s new novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar, which as the title suggests recounts a stand-up comedian’s performance one evening at a night club in the coastal city Netanya, appears to be a complete change in tone and direction from his previous two fiction books To the End of the Land and Falling Out of Time (the latter reviewed on NYJB), emotionally heavy works that either indirectly or directly deal with parental grief.

"But initial appearances can be deceiving, and though the new novel is seasoned with jokes it is a serious work that addresses emotional pain as a source of all art, even a genre as coarse and vulgar as stand-up comedy." -- from my review in New York Journal of Books

"Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s (One Night, Markovitch) second novel Waking Lions starts as a moral drama in its first 14 chapters and becomes a suspenseful crime thriller in its final 11. Its strength lies in its third person narration’s shifting perspectives that develop its characters’ backstories and dramatic situations in the first part and its page turning pacing in the second part, in which the novel’s unanswered questions are resolved." -- from my review in New York Journal of Books
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"With its universal themes of healing, recovery, creativity, and finding one’s vocation The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping should engage the wide readership Appelfeld’s prose deserves. Readers may want to buy extra copies and donate them to VA hospitals." -- from my review in New York Journal of Books.
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"After two novellas translated into English (Nowhere to be Found, 2015 and A Greater Music, 2016, the latter reviewed in NYJB) South Korean post-modernist fiction writer Bae Suah and British translator Deborah Smith—who also translated A Greater Music and two novels by Han Kang (The Vegetarian and Human Acts)—return with an even more ambitious full length novel, Recitation, a novel of ideas with frequent philosophical digressions that further develops A Greater Music’s theme of living abroad while also addressing globalization, racial identity, and intolerance. It is a challenging yet cognitively engaging and rewarding read.

"... This is not a book for lazy readers; Bae expects us to show up ready to work. Her handsome prose, however, is never an obstacle.

"... Recitation will make Bae’s anglophone readers and other fans of post-modern fiction eagerly await the publication of more of her novels in English."
-- from my review in New York Journal of Books
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“For Oz’s fans and liberal Zionist fiction readers Judas is a required text whose writing is its own reward.” -- from my review of in New York Journal of Books

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"Bae’s prose alternates between detailed descriptions of everyday life and ruminative passages on music, ideas, and her character’s mental state. The late American poet William Matthews once described his taste in literature as a preference for prosy poetry and poetic prose. A Greater Music exemplifies the latter category; it requires and amply rewards rereading." -- from my review in New York Journal of Books 

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“Is a proclivity to violence and vengeance a gender and/or regional trait? Are the minds of men more than women and/or rural folk more than city dwellers predisposed to violent acts of revenge? Or put another way, are violence and vengeance intrinsic components of the male psyche, and if so are men more likely to resort to them in rural settings? These are the central questions posed by Israeli novelist Meir Shalev in his seventh novel Two She-Bears (in the original Hebrew Shtayim Dubim, Am Oved, 2013).” — the opening paragraph of my review in New York Journal of Books

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