About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Naomi Klein
Positive The Guardian (UK) Klein hopes this book will be read by people who don\'t read climate-change books (such as me). So it\'s probably my duty to warn you that it is quite wordy, and sees things from a North American angle, and is a bit more vague about renewable energy than I\'d like. But so what – it\'s an unavoidably difficult and complex subject. The argument is signposted throughout with striking buzzwords: Extractivism, Big Green, No Messiahs, Blockadia. Not to mention the brilliant title – an executive summary in itself.
Tom McCarthy
Rave The London Review of Books ...in place of interpretation, the novel chooses instead to echo, repeat, re-enact its founding elements in changing configurations – through bowels and spa towns, trenches and tunnels, crypts and cryptograms, silken sacs and veils ... Ideas travel via lewd puns, slips, metaphors, mishearings, following the method laid out by Freud, and also Joyce – and, perhaps, a half-hidden, half-flagrant, third ... C is organised to look a bit like a realist Bildungsroman, the life and impressions of one young man: he even gets born with a caul on him, as David Copperfield did. Serge, however, attracts no sympathy or empathy or whatever from his creator: he’s a convergence, or rather an area of concentration, where ideas, images, words, preoccupations gather and regroup ... It was like being a guest at the dream-party of an extremely well-read host: things read a long time ago and more or less forgotten, things never read that I always meant to, things I certainly will read now, having seen how McCarthy can make them work ... Literature as event, in McCarthy’s parlance, ripples outwards, allowing mourning to maintain its mystery even as it becomes a social, shared experience.
Mark Fisher
Positive London Review of Books Capitalist Realism, the book, is...full of phrases so vivid and apt and funny they dance across the page like cartoon imps ... There’s also a scary deep in Fisher, a darkness, a left-Lacanian Real ... the most haunting bits of Fisher’s second book aren’t the grand, aphoristic pronouncements, but the descriptions of small, delicate incursions on ordinary life made by electronically transmitted music ... Fisher is just as sensitive a listener to what musicians have to say ... It was a terrible idea of Fisher’s to use the term ‘Vampire Castle’: calling people a bunch of undead bloodsuckers isn’t a great tactic if you want them to listen to you, particularly when they are, whatever your differences with them, people you want on your side.
Elena Ferrante
Rave Harper's The book is centrally concerned with politics and political activism and its effects on the inner lives of the characters. Both Elena and Lila find themselves involved in the explosive events that followed Italy’s Hot Autumn of 1969 … Ferrante’s handling of this difficult material is sensitive, inward, and devoid of slogans or programmatic clichés, even at the meeting of the students’ revolutionary committee … Somehow Ferrante so thoroughly succeeds in her aim of seizing at ‘the evasive thing’ that she has stirred up something from the depths of her mind that touches and spreads through mine.
Chris Kraus
Mixed London Review of Books Is Emily Gould right, then, that this is the most important book about men and women written in the past century?...I agree that it’s a strange sort of instant classic that takes more than a decade to find its fans; but this is the best way I can find to acknowledge this book’s huge charisma while also admitting that it didn’t really work for me. ‘When the form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling,’ Kraus writes of Schoenberg at one point, fully aware, I’d imagine, that her own work too has this self-reflexive neatness. Kraus has also said how much she hates ‘hetero-male … Story of Me’ novels in which ‘everything else’ becomes ‘merely a backdrop to the teller’s personal development’. And yet, her own book is driven exactly by ‘the teller’s personal development’, from frustrated wife to spurned lover to independent woman artist. Beneath the posing and the psychodrama, I Love Dick is an instant-classic feminist Künstlerroman.
Sarah Schulman
Positive Bookforum In some ways The Cosmopolitans is a straightforward period piece—'book-club gold,' as its blurb proclaims—featuring Paul Robeson and huge television sets, and male homosexuality just beginning to edge from the closet in the bohemian enclaves downtown. But it’s also an extraordinarily radical and risky (and not always successful) experiment that seizes on what you thought you knew about the period—the racism, the birth of television, the influence of Freud, the deep ban on any consideration of lesbianism, even as an idea—only to chop it up and reassemble it in jarringly unexpected shapes.