The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.
An eclectic collection about topics related to our current position in the Anthropocene.
In a wide-ranging series of essays, Wilk, author of the acclaimed novel Oval, examines a variety of genre-bending creative works. She derives her title from a Margaret Atwood story about how a missing girl in a liminal person-plant transition becomes part of the landscape. Wilk begins with “what it means to be a person in an age of drastic ecosystem decline—of planetary extinction.” A sense of urgency pervaded what she calls the early systems novels of DeLillo, Coover, Pynchon, and Gaddis, which manipulated or upended genre conventions. Drawing on works by H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Powers, among others, Wilk explores what constitutes weirdness, eeriness, and ecosystems in fiction. She seeks to understand death as a “kind of life through landscape,” including the effects of a toxic environment on people and art as employed in Jenny Hval’s novel Paradise Rot and Karen Russell’s short story “The Bad Graft,” which follows “an unwanted, unexpected, erotic interspecies incursion.” The “impossible terrain” of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Wilk notes, is a good example of “narratives reflecting the transformations of the drastically changing planet.” Pandemic and apocalyptic stories “offer a lot for comprehending our current situation,” while dystopian landscapes “rendered in familiar fashions” can still be titillating or terrifying. Science fiction, Wilk contends, has found its own utopian landscapes in steampunk, solarpunk, cyberpunk, and films like Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. In the latter part of the book, the author verges off into some robust issues about empathy and virtual reality as a “trauma machine” as well as her own intriguing participation in the improvisational theater of a vampire larp (live action role-playing). Wilk concludes with autobiographical reflections on Oval, a larp based on it, and her writing methods.
The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59376-715-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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