In this newly reprinted book from 1998, William Boyd details the life and work of Nat Tate, an artist whose work became highly sought-after in the 1950s. One of the Abstract Expressionists in New York City during that decade, he could usually be found at his studio in the heart of the art district, at galleries, in conversation with Gore Vidal, Frank O’Hara or Peggy Guggenheim, or drinking with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others at the Cedar Tavern on University Place. He traveled to Europe in 1959 and visited Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who became his idol. Every one of his paintings sold almost immediately, most of them before the scheduled gallery openings even took place. His most famous work consisted of over two hundred pen-and-ink drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge, in honor of his favorite poet Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” cycle, and he had started a new series, also honoring Crane, called “White Buildings.” Then, unexpectedly, in January, 1960, at age thirty-one, Nat Tate committed suicide. Later, his entire reputation would be questioned.
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Posted in 9a-2011 Reviews, England, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues on Jun 11th, 2011
Described on Amazon and elsewhere as “the first credit crunch novel,” something that, frankly, would never have lured me into reading it, Get Me Out of Here is much more like an adult version of Patrick McCabe’s novel of psychological horror, The Butcher Boy, than it is a broad satire of the London business community at large. The book focuses almost exclusively on Matt Freeman, a thirty-three year-old Londoner who is trying to run his financial business, an overly-driven young urban professional, with all the stereotypical hang-ups about appearances, brand names, personal connections, and the toys of success. Matt, as narrator, conveys every thought that enters his mind, every twisted bit of false logic, every sensation, every hope for the future, and every self-deluded justification for the crimes he commits—and he commits a lot of them. We know his personal friends, all his lovers, and his neighborhood–he is individualized, not the generic stick figure we usually see in satires. The focus here is on the small, not the broad and universal–the life of one young man whose problems are so extreme that he cannot be considered “typical,” even among psychopaths. Full of wonderful, grim humor and irony.
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Alaa al Aswany made his literary mark in 2002 when he wrote The Yacoubian Building, a novel set in one apartment building in central Cairo in which virtually all the pressures within the country are illustrated. It was “the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt,” according to National Geographic. Now Al Aswany may become even more famous for a series of articles he wrote for the Arabic press from 2005 to the present. Always a believer in human rights, which he believed were being trampled under the thirty-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, who appeared to be preparing the country for a handover of power to his son Gamal, the author became a vocal supporter of those who began to challenge Mubarak publicly beginning in 2005. In a series of regular articles and columns that he wrote for an Egyptian audience, Al Aswany used his popularity and literary power to try to reach all elements of Egyptian society, examining some of the issues which separated Egyptians from each other in an effort to show the importance of cooperation for the larger purpose of bringing about democracy in a country which had known only despotism, poverty, and corruption for decades. This book, published by the American University in Cairo Press, is a collection of these articles, written primarily between the summer of 2009 and October, 2010. Explaining complex issues in language which all can understand, Al Aswany worked toward a new beginning in Egypt
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Having lived in Iceland for over ten years, Quentin Bates got to know the country and its politics well, before moving back to the UK during Iceland’s continuing economic crisis. He had observed political corruption there with fresh eyes, and he now uses his outrage as the basis of this complex and unusual murder mystery in which he illustrates how some elected officials are able to parlay their connections into illegal gains and large personal bank accounts. Officer Gunnhildur, a widow described as a “big fat lass with a face that frightens the horses,’ has been with the police department for sixteen years and now runs the police station in the small village of Hvalvik. When the body of an unidentified young man is found in the water beside the docks, Gunna investigates, and when she discovers that one of the victim’s close friends was killed in a road accident the previous spring, she becomes sure that it is murder. Both had been interested in Clean Iceland, an organization which promotes clean energy and keeps an eye on dams, the environment, and power sources. At issue is a contract that has been awarded recently for the building of a privately run smelting company across the bay, and that company and its public relations offshoot, Spearpoint, are directly connected to the Ministry of Environmental Affairs and run by the wife of one of the ministers.
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In this collection of stories about life’s uncertainties, Robert Boswell picks up his characters like mechanical toys and winds them up tight, and just when they are at maximum tension, he twists the key one more turn, guaranteeing that they will unwind noisily, out of control. Virtually all his characters are losers. A woman, having lost her disabled husband, now finds that she has also lost her best friend. A housecleaner has been abandoned by her husband. An attention-seeking motel manager demands that a patron strip search her. A needy young man goes broke while in the thrall of a fortune teller. A priest tries to help a pathetic family by offering a “story to have faith in, even if he cannot entirely believe it.” The stories are sometimes bleak, but they are always haunting. The characters are just one twist away from the normal, the safe, and the real, feeling instead to be “different,” irrational, sometimes dangerous, and even frightening. Ultimately, these unforgettable characters with their haunted and damaged lives, leave the reader uncomfortable with their ironies. Damaged as many characters are, they are close enough to ourselves and those we know to feel familiar to us.
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