RaveSpectrum Culture\"The Resisters is most exciting because its dystopian world is relayed in Gish’s trademark style, with her crisp, vivid prose and occasionally vicious, often lovable and completely human characters ... Jen\'s...an expert at writing about parents and children, about how the expectations of one generation can influence the actions of another ... One of the more satisfying elements of the world that Jen introduces here is how easy it is to extrapolate our current world into it ... Jen holds up a mirror and allows us to see where we’re wrong right now ... She has fun with the dystopian elements of The Resisters without undermining her purpose, which appears to be a commentary on the ways we’re ruining the world and each other. It’s particularly satisfying to see her place the blame firmly in the reader’s own hands, forcing us to acknowledge that the damage we’ve done to ourselves has been a choice rather than something inevitable.
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C Pam Zhang
RaveSpectrum Culture... gorgeous ... [Zhang] She creates her own mythology as she weaves her tale, all while shedding light on a whitewashed portion of history ... a vast and intriguing land to spend time in, and within it she tells a powerful, intimate story ... The story is compelling, beautifully written and at times propulsively plotted, and through it Zhang examines a number of themes, from gender identity to sexuality to abuse to racism and beyond. But these themes are all true to the exciting story at the novel’s center, which twists and punches while crackling with literary language. She uses foreshadowing to build tension and uses creative and magical ways to bring Ba and Ma’s story into play ... s stumble in the night. Many interactions are marked by glances and glares, pinches and presses rather than exclamations or more overt violence. But howls do come, as does the violence, and it’s all the more effective given the quiet nature of other passages ... Zhang takes a genre that has been stuck in its ways since the beginning, breaks it wide open and revels in it. There are shades of The Grapes of Wrath here, as well as Lonesome Dove and True Grit. These knowing homages make How Much of These Hills Is Gold all the more impressive, because Zhang is taking on the idols and ideals of the masculine western right in their own backyard. And she wins; there is more to be found in these Hills than those other works, and there is so much fun to be had in the finding.
Julian Barnes
RaveSpectrum CultureThe Belle Époque—the classier, artier French cousin to the Gilded Age—comes to vibrant, sexy life in Julian Barnes’ new biography The Man in the Red Coat ... The Man Booker Prize-winning Barnes is an excellent writer of both fiction and nonfiction and his creative mind comes to his aid in telling Pozzi’s tale ... The Man in the Red Coat is an exciting, surprising and informative look at an age that is historically famous but also under the radar when compared to its geographic and temporal neighbors. At times, the book itself feels like art come to life, which in a way it is.
Brandon Taylor
RaveSpectrum CultureAs gay black man from the South in the halls of Midwestern academia, Wallace is targeted in large and small ways by these people. And what Taylor shows so powerfully through Wallace is the burden of choices placed upon him by this treatment ... His self-examination mostly plays out in smooth third person, which, along with the campus locale, lovely environmental details and concise, one-weekend temporal setting lends a cinematic quality to Real Life. Taylor so impressively renders character movement and facial reactions that you can feel his camera panning in and out to capture the most important details ... Perhaps the most impressive part of Real Life is the way in which Taylor shows the space and weight that emotions and feelings take up in life ... Taylor is so good at creating conversation, at conveying melodrama with making his work into melodrama ... a brisk but deep novel that really has it all. It contains richly felt drama and intriguing characters that jump off the page with deceptive ease. Though it’s a relatively quick read, we’re given time to think, and absorb, and even cry, but we also get to laugh at characters and judge characters and, like the best art, are invited to judge ourselves, too.
Garth Greenwell
RaveSpectrum CultureGarth Greenwell’s writing is the kind of writing that is so crisp and haunting, so elegiacally beautiful, that it is immediately claimed by the literary mainstream. Surely prose so intelligent and introspective, so worldly and relatable, must transcend categorization? Surely it must belong to everyone? It doesn’t ... The joy of reading Greenwell – for this reader, at least – is how magnificently gay it is ... Greenwell’s fiercely sexy new novel Cleanness is something gay readers won’t want to share. After centuries of reading about the sexual conquests of straight men, Greenwell’s peeling away of the layers of desire, confusion, evolution and role-playing that accompany the gay sexual experience is revelatory for the gay reader.
Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan Trans. by, Clare O'Farrell
PositiveSpectrum CultureAn attractive, tidily organized collection of famed French philosopher Michel Foucault’s writing about film as well as scholarly reflections on that writing, translator/editor Clare O’Farrell’s Foucault at the Movies is a necessity for film scholars and philosophers alike. Filled with writing about Foucault and by Foucault himself, Foucault at the Movies is an effectively translated and admirably assembled work of film scholarship and philosophical history. Though the book would be a suitable text for a university course on philosophy, film or both, it is also readable enough to serve as entertainment as well.
