Category Archives: Hooray Fiction!

by | May 13, 2013 · 9:00 am

Early American Pastoral

Two American Scenes

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Pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sparked the American Revolution, so it’s fitting that a pamphlet should rekindle our sense of patriotism. The second issue of the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series features a diptych of American poems unearthed and reassembled by Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger.

Davis offers a retelling of the diary of Sidney Brooks, her great-great-great uncle, who lived in the village of Harwich on Cape Cod in the early 1800s. With its anthropological attention to the landscape and its people, Davis’s poem could serve as an origin myth for America.

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Filed under Eliot Weinberger, Hooray Fiction!, John Wesley Powell, Lydia Davis, New Directions, New Directions Poetry Pamphlets, Poetry

by | May 6, 2013 · 4:31 pm

Some Gatsbys are Greater than Others, Ctd.

And then there’s Kathryn Schulz at New York Magazine, who doesn’t think any Gatsbys are worth a damn:

…Gatsby is in a class by itself. It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere ­intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience.

Schulz finds The Great Gatsby to be “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent,” and believes that “we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains.” Experience the full brunt of her dislike here. Feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree in the comments.

More of Fiction Advocate’s Gatsby coverage here.

- Michael Moats

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by | May 2, 2013 · 7:00 am

Back to the Dark Chamber

Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, and Waiting for the Barbarians

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Today it’s been exactly two years since Osama Bin Laden was killed. The date has, unsurprisingly, gotten me thinking about Zero Dark Thirty again. The film was released on DVD last month. Presumably it’s now crowding Best Buy shelves and the “shopping carts” of countless Amazon accounts, promising the chance to relive the moment of supreme discomfort that occurred when we were all in the theater this winter, crunching popcorn happily through the previews, only to be suddenly confronted with the screams of 9/11 audio that open the film. As you know, the moral queasiness of Zero Dark only intensifies from there, the torture scenes in particular drawing much critical attention (“Did they, or did they not suggest that ‘enhanced interrogation’ directly led to the killing of Bin Laden?” etc.). By this point, the depiction of these acts has been debated and counter-debated and counter-counter-debated. However, for anyone who—like me—still can’t stop thinking about it, I have a recommendation.

No novel better wrestles with the ramifications of torture—and its “usefulness” to national security—than Waiting for the Barbarians by South African Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. Set in an imaginary desert colony named simply “the frontier,” Waiting for the Barbarians follows a local official as he deals with the Third Bureau, an agency tasked with protecting a vast nation called “the Empire.” The book makes it clear early on that its story functions as an allegory for the nature of imperialism. As the plot unfolds, the Third Bureau begins to suspect that “the barbarians” (a.k.a. natives of the frontier) are plotting to destroy the Empire. Throughout the novel the Third Bureau aims to crush an imminent barbarian attack, which it suspects may happen at any moment. But the Bureau has no evidence, except for the torture-induced confessions of a few barbarians.

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Filed under Hooray Fiction!, J. M. Coetzee, Kathryn Bigelow, Osama Bin Laden, Waiting for the Barbarians, Zero Dark Thirty

by | April 30, 2013 · 9:38 am

Some Gatsbys are Greater than Others

FA Gatsby CoverLast week, the New York Times reported that The Great Gatsby “is dividing the nation’s booksellers with dueling paperback editions: the enigmatic blue cover of the original and the movie tie-in book that went on sale Tuesday, a brash, flashy version with Leonardo DiCaprio front and center.” The hero of the story was Kevin Cassem at New York’s McNally Jackson Books, who explained, “We’re selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.” Mr. Cassem, saying what we’ve all been thinking, added: “I think it would bring shame to anyone who was trying to read that book on the subway.”

Not surprisingly, these feelings are not shared by the people of Wal-Mart, who don’t tend to evaluate things based on subway cred, and more often think in terms of amassing “fresh green” that is “commensurate to [their] capacity for wonder.” The mega store will be selling the novel in the Leonardo DiCaprio cover and only the Leonardo DiCaprio cover, which, honestly, will be much more effective at luring people into a story that couldn’t be further from everyday low prices.

The good news in all of this is that people are talking about The Great Gatsby and thinking about good, old fashioned book covers. At this point in the year, sales of Gatsby are projected to put it among the best selling books of the year, allowing it to serve as “a literary palate cleanser to follow 2012, when the American book-buying public gorged on the Fifty Shades erotica series.”

Over the years, there have been many different covers of The Great Gatsby, some greater than others. The Times again has the scoop, and has collected images of the book from over the years and around the world.

(FYI — McNally Jackson’s Book of the Month is Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which Brian Hurley is excited to tell you all about.)

- Michael Moats

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by | April 17, 2013 · 6:46 am

The Hung Over, Part II

FA Bodies

FA review tag

I never watched The Hangover: Part II. I loved the original movie deeply, but was told by multiple sources that the second was a trudging, shot-for-shot remake of its predecessor, and what had been so charming and fresh–even in the tired genre of drunk buddy films–lost its appeal with repetition. So with that in mind, let me be the first to ever say: The closest I’ve come to watching  The Hangover: Part II was  reading Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.

Bodies was the 2012 Booker Prize winner and one of my most anticipated reads after loving, deeply, its 2009 Booker Prize winning predecessor, Wolf Hall. But throughout the novel, I consistently felt as if I’d seen this all before, and that what had been so engaging in the first go round–even in the tired genre of historical fiction–was less so with repetition.

This is not to say that Bring up the Bodies is not worth your time, or anywhere near as bad as the second Hangover was rumored to be. Continue reading →

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by | April 3, 2013 · 1:32 pm

4 Years, 4 Books, 4 Free

UPDATE: The giveaway is over, but our publications are still here.

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Fiction Advocate is turning 4 years old!

Celebrate with us by downloading all 4 of our e-books.

They’re free until the end of April.

So please tell your friends to crash this party and take our stuff.

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TRHCIn the award-winning, critically acclaimed essay “The Real Holden Caulfield,” Michael Moats offers the definitive history of one of literature’s most beloved characters.

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BrothelThe debut novel from New York City playwright J. Boyett, Brothel is an erotic farce about three college girls and the diabolically charismatic friend who convinces them to open a whorehouse.

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PostShawn Andrew Mitchell’s masterful, rambling essay on the masterful, rambling essays of Geoff Dyer comes with colorful GIFs and clickable footnotes and all sorts of futuristic whizbangs.

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RRHANCIn real life Robert Repino’s first novel is soon to be published by a major NYC press. But in this book he gets slandered by a dear friend in a series of 117 outlandish lies.

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Filed under Geoff Dyer, Holden Caulfield, Hooray Fiction!, J. Boyett, J. D. Salinger, Robert Repino, Shawn Andrew Mitchell

by | March 24, 2013 · 10:10 am

Failing Around

Illustration by Leo Espinosa for The New Yorker

Illustration by Leo Espinosa for The New Yorker

Even if you have to ransack the magazines at a dentist’s office, or hack into Condé Nast using your ex-boyfriend’s subscriber info, I strongly recommend that you read “Cry Me a River” by Giles Harvey in the March 25 issue of The New Yorker. It’s a smart and even-tempered takedown of failure memoirs.

A growing batch of memoirs by literary screw-ups and also-rans suggests that mistakes—the bigger and more luridly described the better—might be a portal to the success, or, at the very least, the solvency, that eluded their authors the first time around. The formula is simple: when all else fails, write about your failure.

Citing “the widespread belief that candor will do the work of talent,” Harvey faults a number of recent memoirs for subscribing to “a doctrine of writing that values ‘honesty’ and ‘truth’ above the supposedly adulterating qualities of craft and composition.” In a culture where “self-analysis has been supplanted by mawkish exhibitionism,” suffering for one’s art can become a substitute for making art that’s worthwhile. Harvey traces the source of this evil to David Shields—the bumbling Antichrist of literature—and to the crumbling of the publishing industry, which has “created a generation of professional failurists whose great subject is how the publishing industry ruined their lives.”

Anyway, it’s good. Read it.

- Brian Hurley

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Filed under David Shields, David Shields is a bumbling literary Antichrist, Fuck the New Yorker, Giles Harvey, Hooray Fiction!

by | March 22, 2013 · 5:09 pm

Fiction Advocate of the Day

The Roots: “Push pen to paper like Chinua Achebe.”

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Filed under Chinua Achebe, Fiction Advocate of the Day, Hooray Fiction!, The Roots, Things Fall Apart