Category: Review
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Paradise Drowned
Behold my favorite shot: The camera is static. Eli Sunday emerges out of the bottom-right corner. His black figure blocks almost half of our view. On his left, a toxic pool of oil placidly parades as a bizarre facsimile of the sky, while the pipe discharging the thick fluid seems instead to spew out light…
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Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie is a bizarre book, obsessed with fashion, offering a clash between form and content. Naturalism always revels in a preposterous sense of essentialism and determinism. Case in point: Theodore Dreiser’s heroine has an atavistic instinct for shopping. In fact, the obtrusive narration of Sister Carrie keeps making osten-tedious arguments about women and fashion.…
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The History of Sound (2024), Ben Shattuck
The History of Sound has a sense of the ephemeral and the historical, of continuity and rupture. It creates a present perpetually haunted by unintelligible echoes of the past, siren calls of blighted archives. The stories are spread over some three centuries of New England history, from the colonial era to the recent past, in…
Sarah Owl Jewett 