Search Results

“... Imagine a song, she said, that gives voice to people’s anger. These weren’t her actual words. The anger precedes the song, she continued, but the song precedes the people, the people are back-formed from their singing, which socialises feeling, expands the domain of the feelable. The voice must be sung into existence, so song precedes speech, clears the ground for it ...”

“... Does​ Karl Ove Knausgaard have a style? His sentences, while often long, are not elaborate; they can read like lists. ‘Infamously direct’, is how his English publisher puts it. He has a tendency towards cliché: news is always spreading like wildfire, and so on. The writing, precisely where it aspires to the literary, can be sloppy: ‘The warm, bright September days were summer’s last burst of energy before abruptly crumbling ...”

“... In ninth grade​ English Mrs X required us to memorise and recite a poem and so I asked the Topeka High librarian to direct me to the shortest poem she knew and she suggested Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’, which, in the 1967 version, reads in its entirety: I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect    contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine ...”

“... I once thought that I read about other minds as a release from my own until I came to the scene in Ben Lerner’s last novel, 10:04, in which the writer’s alter ego, Ben, is in a fertility clinic in Brooklyn to produce a cup of sperm for his friend, Alex, to use to get pregnant. I’ve never been to a fertility ...”

“... of life exerts more of a pull on Adam than the artifice of any art. Over the past eight years, Ben Lerner, who is 33, has published three poetry collections. The poems’ many preoccupations recur in the novel: war, women, America, American idioms, communication, emptiness, the suburbs, video games. In interviews ...”

“... The first thing​ the narrator of 10:04 does is make a lot of money. Ben is a poet, novelist and creative-writing teacher, a career that for most of his working life seems not to have made him rich. But recently he had a story in the New Yorker. Book publishers were interested. ‘Soon there was a competitive auction among the major New York houses,’ he signed a ‘strong six-figure contract’ and he and his agent are eating an expensive celebratory meal ‘in what would become the opening scene ...”

“... clef and autofiction, the hip blend of fiction and memoir associated with writers like Knausgaard, Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti. If most of Crudo is true, then what does the novel gain by being a novel at all? At the back of the book, all the quotations are identified, providing a key of sorts. But Laing’s own Twitter feed is another key to the novel, as ...”

“... sort of writing Smith tries out here, the seemingly non-fictional sort seen in the novels of Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti, and in Smith’s own essays. As the title On Beauty had been already used by Elaine Scarry, so Swing Time has been borrowed from the title of the 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicle, a black and white musical of waltzes and ...”

“... Argo​ fuck yourself.’ The line is repeated several times in Ben Affleck’s 2012 historical spy thriller, Argo. Based on the memoir by Tony Mendez, a CIA agent, the movie depicts the covert rescue of six US embassy workers caught up in the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis; the CIA used a fake film-shoot – of a schlocky sci-fi story called ‘Argo’ – as cover for spiriting the diplomats out of Tehran ...”

“... absolute loss. We have in general come to accept the account of Shakespeare gently offered by Ben Jonson, later hardened and simplified by Milton, as a poet without learning, warbling his ‘native woodnotes wild’. Jonson and Milton both knew far more Latin and Greek than Shakespeare, so perhaps they could afford such judgments. I am not sure that we ...”

“... House for artists like Pablo Casals – had thoroughly enjoyed the mediocre musical written by Lerner and Loewe where, ‘for one brief shining moment’, King Arthur had enjoyed absolute power over his knights. (And Sir Lancelot over their women.) You might think that an invocation of mythical yet absolute monarchy would put bow-tied American scholars and ...”