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<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cFew novelists risk jumping on the runaway horse of contemporary life as recklessly as Gary Shteyngart. For the fiction writer, stuck at the plodding speed of publishing, such a maneuver requires gauging both political velocity and cultural direction. And yet, book after book, Shteyngart arrives just where\u2014and when\u2014we need him to.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe abiding miracle of Shteyngart\u2019s work is that it seems just as timely as a Shouts & Murmurs gag in this week\u2019s New Yorker while staying fixed to the timeless absurdity of human life. That dexterity speaks to the range of his sympathy and the depth of his attention. It may also stem from being born in the U.S.S.R.\u2014little Igor Shteyngart emigrated to the United States in 1979; he knows in his kishkes how tightly the latest joke is braided through the oldest tragedy. Shteyngart\u2019s new novel, Vera, or Faith, tastes at first like a cherry-flavored gumdrop, but it\u2019ll burn a hole in your tongue.<\/p>\n
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\u201cLonely, precocious children in novels can be as appealing as a sticky handkerchief. But Vera is too self-possessed to be sentimental. Shteyngart, who captured his own awkward adolescence so brilliantly in his memoir, Little Failure (2014), lets us hear the melody of humor and the bass line of despair in Vera\u2019s voice. Many of her concerns are minor, of course, but through her adolescent chatter, we can also make out the very real troubles corroding her world. Holden Caulfield responded to the ennui and existential despair of the Cold War by sinking into depression and glib cynicism; Vera reacts to our era\u2019s deadly division with fits of perfectionism, striving to mend all conflicts everywhere. As ever, our political and social toxins collect in the brains of children like mercury.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013Ron Charles on Gary Shteyngart\u2019s Vera, or Faith<\/strong><\/a> (The Washington Post<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cFor all its cheeky nods to actual celebrities both major and minor, Service is not an insider\u2019s book, nor is it written for the cognoscenti. It is, rather, a book about the destruction of bohemia and the nightmare of trying to live\u2014let alone make art\u2014with very little money. Like Lynne Tillman\u2019s great No Lease on Life (1998), which follows a young woman who works as a proofreader at a prestigious magazine and lives in the rundown East Village, Service belongs to a uniquely contemporary genre that might be called the novel of gentrification. It tells the story of what Richard Eder (reviewing No Lease on Life in the Los Angeles Times) described as \u2018the new dispossessed: the low-income middle class whose only wisp of security is a toehold on a rent-stabilized apartment on a rotting block.\u2019 In a country where tens of millions of people work service jobs and about one tenth of all jobs belong to the gig economy\u2014jobs that are part-time, precarious, and often lacking health insurance\u2014the newly dispossessed narrator may be the antihero we need.<\/p>\n Article continues after advertisement<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike the relation between master and servant, the dynamic between customer and service worker cannot be openly acknowledged for what it is: the product of a social system in which one group of human beings is dominated and exploited for the benefit of another. The lie of the service economy is that we\u2019re all friends here, and it is the job of people like Sean to maintain this lie, to make visitors to the bookstore feel as though they are being waited on by an equal\u2026<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026the characters in Service are caught in a culture in which people can be reduced to footholds in a lifestyle. In a city\u2014and a century\u2014where all but the extraordinarily rich feel downwardly mobile, we date, fuck, and befriend those we think can help us hold on to who we think we are: a middle-aged man who\u2019s still got it, a woman whose fame means she\u2019s not alone. It\u2019s a grim picture of vanity and masochism, of self-regard so unshakable that there are no depths to which we won\u2019t sink to preserve it. Or, as Sean puts it, \u2018You don\u2019t need to have a death wish to live in Los Angeles, but it helps.’\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Anahid Nersessian on John Tottenham\u2019s Service<\/strong> (The New York Review of Books<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cSo long have serial killers been a staple of American popular entertainment\u2026that it\u2019s a welcome reminder in Caroline Fraser\u2019s unrelentingly bleak and impassioned Murderland that not all of them are individuals: \u2018Corporations can be people, and people can be killers, ergo, corporations can be killers \u2026\u00a0The product of vast research into the correlation between violent behavior and neurological damage associated with high levels of environmental pollutants (lead, asbestos, arsenic) in the blood, it is an amalgam of true crime reportage, visionary muckraking in the tradition of Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring (1962), and a startlingly candid memoir of Fraser\u2019s girlhood in the Seattle area in \u2018the time of serial killers\u2019\u2014both individual and corporate. Its theme is simple and terrible enough to be repeated time and again through four-hundred-plus pages: \u2018More lead, more murder.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThough Murderland might be cataloged as ecojournalism, it is also a multi-true-crime narrative related in a breathlessly propulsive manner. Folded into the charges against corporate polluters like ASARCO are passages that fairly spring off the page.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cAs the chronicler of Murderland Fraser doesn\u2019t identify herself as wholly alien to Bundy et al. in the way that writers usually detach themselves from subjects as horrific as hers. And she doesn\u2019t detach herself from the instinct to kill, not serially but in her girlhood wish to murder her father and, perhaps most surprisingly, her disappointment as an adult that she never did.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThe sympathetic reader is inclined to inquire: Why are sexual serial killers the sole concern of Murderland, rather than mass murderers, school shooters, and domestic terrorists, so much more representative of the current violence of the United States? It is likely that gun violence also springs from mental illness or brain dysfunction, whether caused by lead-spewing smelters or hate-spewing right-wing media, not to mention (as Fraser does not) the prevalence in the US of every sort of firearm and ever more lax gun control laws.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Joyce Carol Oates on Caroline Fraser\u2019s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers<\/strong><\/a> (The New York Review of Books<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Fascism\u2019 is notoriously difficult to define. It insisted on conformism while attracting bohemians and subversives, fused manic idealism with brutal cynicism and combined elements of modernism and pastoral nostalgia. The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that \u2018fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.\u2019 In Malaparte, Maurizio Serra\u2019s outstanding biography of the Italian dandy, journalist, playwright, would-be diplomat and filmmaker Curzio Malaparte, the author makes clear that Benjamin was correct. Whatever else it was, 20th-century fascism was a project more of imagination than reason; it was driven by aspiring European elites who presented themselves as populists in their pursuit of grandeur and greatness.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThe sociologist Michael Mann once wrote, \u2018Fascism was a movement of the lesser intelligentsia,\u2019 but Malaparte was a first-rate talent as both journalist and fiction writer. Still, he struggled to put his creative energy to constructive use: He looked down on losers, but, in his misbegotten schemes and futile projects, he found himself among their ranks.<\/p>\n There is a pathetic aspect to Serra\u2019s account of Malaparte\u2019s life, a solipsism that despaired of finding anything worthwhile in life other than movement and adventure. The anti-intellectual intellectual, the macho man who wore makeup and sported perfectly coifed hair; physically courageous as a soldier and war correspondent but in politics and his personal life a moral coward; the militant anti-communist fascinated with Lenin\u2019s Russia and, eventually, Mao\u2019s China; the bourgeois snob who hated the bourgeoise and idealized both proletarians and aristocrats: Malaparte embodied, almost perfectly, the contradictory impulses of the fascist generation.<\/p>\n Malaparte was not among fascism\u2019s top ranks. He was not one of the chief ideologues, like his fellow writer Giuseppe Bottai. But, as his literary fame spread during the interwar period, he showed fascism\u2019s seductive side and cultivated a fraught relationship with Mussolini that continued into the 1930s. Malaparte demonstrates that fascism was not only a collective enterprise and cult of the leader, but an individual one: a narcissistic worship of the self and a chance for ambitious young men from the provinces, dissatisfied with their place in liberal society, to embark upon a career.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013John Ganz on Maurizio Serra\u2019s Malaparte: A Biography <\/strong>(The New York Times Book Review<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cI approached Red Barns gingerly, expecting harrowing descriptions of slaughterhouses and a litany of woes that would flatten me\u2014and possibly, finally, drive me to the veganism I\u2019ve long resisted because of my fondness for cheese.<\/p>\n Such reluctance to engage with the ongoing tragedy of corporate meat production, after all, is the ugly cross that animal rights activists have to bear. Environmentalists advocating for wild landscapes and creatures have breathtaking panoramas and wildlife charisma to help with their public calls to action. Look at this beauty! they can say. Help us save it! But activists trying to put a stop to the heartbreaking misery of animals being raised for food by large corporate entities have no beauty to sell. All they\u2019ve got is: Look at this torture! Most of us prefer not to. Luckily, Little Red Barns isn\u2019t a depressing litany, though it may well change your mind about buying industrial meat.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cWe tend to take our food for granted, shrugging off the distant unpleasantness of factory farms as the price of a tasty slab of bacon. And yet this food empire isn\u2019t an economic inevitability. It is, Potter explains, a result of a concerted, decades-long campaign by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congress and their corporate-ag sponsors to consolidate production and squeeze out small farmers (historically, often Black). More recently, it\u2019s the work of a few very, very rich companies. Potter reports that \u2018four companies operate about 75 percent of the world\u2019s corporate beef packing plants and abattoirs. Another four control about 70 percent of pig slaughter.\u2019<\/p>\n Even if we put humaneness and decency aside, the climate damage and extinctions being wrought by our funneling of resources into meat\u2014when plant-based foods are both healthier and more efficient at delivering nutrients\u2014mean we have to look far deeper than the Old MacDonald song, with its vanished quaintness, and past the illusive images of cowboy cool that still serve to reassure us that our farms and feedlots are fine places. Let\u2019s tell ourselves the story, Potter writes, that\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Lydia Millet on Will Potter\u2019s Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, from Farm to Table<\/strong><\/a> (The Washington Post<\/a>)<\/p>\n Like this:<\/p>\n Like Loading…<\/p>\n![\"Service](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Service-202x300.jpg\")
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<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Malaparte\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Malaparte-203x300.jpg\")
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