Articles Archive for Sam Sacks
Two new novels by Adam Haslett and Jonathan Dee attempt to show us the way we live now by exposing the quality of the characters who handle (or, as the case may be, mishandle) our money.
In Changing My Mind novelist Zadie Smith, long a literary essayist, gathers together her burgeoning belles-lettres. Is it just a chance collection or does a common theme run through them? Sam Sacks reviews her views.
Perennially underrated novelist Pete Dexter’s latest, Spooner, continues his fascination with damaged characters. Sam Sacks tours a body of work composed mostly of battered bodies.
In our second annual Fiction Bestseller List feature, our writers temporarily put aside their dogeared copies of Hume and Mann, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the ten bestselling novels in the land as of September 6, 2009 – in the tranquil days before a certain Dan Brown novel began tromping all over that list like Godzilla in downtown Tokyo. Before you spend your hard-earned money at the bookstore, join us in a tour of the way we read now.
A local, a booster, and a tourist take on New York; Sam Sacks tours the city with E.L. Doctorow, Colm Tóibín, and Colum McCann.
Colson Whitehead, one of our most intellectually satisfying writers, has written a “novel” that meanders suspiciously like a memoir. Sam Sacks reviews Sag Harbor.
Arthur Phillips’ new novel, The Song Is You, takes a sentimental bachelor’s soundtrack and sets it to adult themes of family tragedy. Sam Sacks listens to hear whether the opus reveals new growth in the novelist—and whether it will grow on the reader.
China’s burgeoning modern literature – by citizens and expats alike – presents challenges to Western audiences (and sometimes to Chinese censors). Sam Sacks samples three new novels, including Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants.
In her new novel Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips grapples with the challenge of using intricate language to convey wordless innocence. Sam Sacks is sympathetic to her goal, but he can’t help thinking of William Faulkner …
Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives took the literary world by storm, and his latest posthumous release, 2666, is five times as long and ten times as ambitious. Find out what tales dead men tell as Sam Sacks tackles this immense and problematic monster.
What is it about Booker and Nobel judges that make one reach for Chambers Biographical Dictionary only to hurl it across the room in despair? Sam Sacks seeks the source of prize-winner Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.
It was only a matter of time before Hurricane Katrina and the havoc it wrought on New Orleans filtered into the fiction we read, and Tom Piazza’s latest novel City of Refuge is set squarely in and around the disaster and its victims. Sam Sacks tours the result.
For sixty years, the great and shapeshifting American author Evan S. Connell has woven strands of short stories through the fabric of his ongoing larger works. These beguiling stories have changed (and often deepened) with time while many of their ardors and tensions have remained the same, creating an irresistible dialectic. The three founding editors of Open Letters, united in their appreciation for this living legend of the American literary scene, pay tribute by writing a piece apiece on Connell’s life, career, and latest short story collection, Lost in Uttar Pradesh.
Since Salman Rushdie’s published The Enchantress of Florence, plenty of critics have trotted out what Martin Amis calls “the bullshit factfile” to to make their wordcount. Sam Sacks, for one, has heard more than enough about the fatwa, thanks…
Near the punchbowl, within reach of the finger sandwiches, the early critics of James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning had an oh-so-polite set of things to say about it. Out back in the alley, other critics were ready to pounce. In this regular feature, Sam Sacks officiates between the Sharks and the Jets.
Shadow Country is the culmination of a thirty-year obsession with the notorious Everglades pioneer Edgar J. Watson. Sam Sacks treks into the beautiful and blood-soaked territory of Peter Matthiessen’s magnum opus.
In My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru attempts to show the moral emptiness of antigovernment violence. The problem is, Sam Sacks thinks, Kunzru sees emptiness in everything he writes about.
Two new novelists, Charles Bock and Andrew Foster Altschul, have paraded into the public eye with the help of ticker tape and noisemakers from their publishers. Sam Sacks takes the bait and looks to see if their novels merit the hubbub.
Richard Price has called The Wire “as close to a novel as anything on TV.” Sam Sacks examines whether Price’s new book Lush Life is as close to TV as anything in a novel.
Sam Sacks reviews Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure, an old-fashioned reading guide that wants desperately to believe it hasn’t been made altogether anachronistic by the Internet, that elephant in the corner of the library.
This month our regular feature is devoted to a study of the small but potent canon of Marilynne Robinson. Sam Sacks dives back into her famous fiction and formidable essays.
Sam Sacks contrasts the Nazis’ murderous theft of Irène Némirovsky’s life with the bright, redeeming light of her newly translated novel Fire in the Blood.
James Wood, Christopher Hitchens, Michiko Kakutani, and many others have competed to put forth the definitive word on Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. Sam Sacks is off to the races with them in this regular feature.
Thomaston, the setting of his new novel Bridge of Sighs, is the most diverse and complicated town Richard Russo has yet created. Sam Sacks navigates its vivid highways and byways.
Juno Díaz’ Drown was as impressive a debut as any in the 90s. Eleven years later, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is finally on the shelves. Sam Sacks reviews what the burden of expectation on the author’s shoulders has produced.
David Malouf may have written more thoroughly about Australia than any writer in history. Now that his Complete Stories is out, Sam Sacks assesses the fruit of his thirty-year career.
In our monthly feature, Sam Sacks clambers over the mountain of
reviews of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, spotting perspicacity,
purple prose, and possible pickpocketing along the way.
Like The Kite Runner before it, A Thousand Splendid Suns owns
real estate on the top of the bestseller list. Sam Sacks dares to
unlock the secret of Khaled Hosseini.
Sam Sacks reviews the fun and flawed new novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and tries to answer the question on everybody’s lips: what exactly is Michael Chabon doing?
Sam Sacks reviews Jon Clinch’s Finn, a novel about Huck Finn’s father, and decides that it owes a heavy debt to a literary figure apart from Mark Twain.
In this monthly feature, Sam Sacks surveys the reviews of Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, which caused some confused tail-chasing amongst its critics.
Sam Sacks looks into the breakout debuts of young novelists to determine how youth, ambition, and general cluelessness affect the writing of these early works.
Sam Sacks reviews The Castle in the Forest, Norman Mailer’s new novel about evil and Hitler and, amazingly, not about Norman Mailer.
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