review.gawker.comGawker Review of Books

Related Blogs Antiviral Art The Best Restaurant in New York Blackbag Defamer Disputations Documents Dodgeandburn Dog Domesticity Drugs Fine Vining Fortress America FrenchGawker Weird Internet Interviews Justice Morning After PhaseZero Politburo Rankings Sausage Slowgawker Sony Hack One Man’s Take The Cuck Themachines The Vane The West tktk True Stories Valleywag Donald Trump’s New Deal Patrick W. Gallagher · 11/12/15 02:15PM Most people consider Donald Trump to be a gratuitous self-promoter, a somewhat charismatic actor, a clown, a demagogue, a misogynist, or a racist. But what everyone needs to understand about him is that what he considers himself, first and foremost, is a builder. In his latest book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again —the third book that he has written as a politician, after The America We Deserve (2000) and Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again (2011)—he repeats the same gesture that he also makes in the other two, namely that he constantly cites his building accomplishments as qualifications that make him better suited than any career politician imaginable to be President of the United States. Author Umberto Eco Plots What, Exactly? CML · 11/11/15 10:15AM Umberto Eco’s first new novel in five years, Numero Zero , weighs in at 192 pages, versus 400+ for his previous efforts. I’m pretty Eco-friendly— The Name of the Rose was a lot of fun, if a bit overlong—so I was looking forward to something like Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum , except shorter, tighter, and brighter. Instead, readers of Numero Zero will find a little mystery, a bit of fantasy, some humor, and a lot of explanation: for better or for worse, this is a change of pace for Eco. 8 Terrifying Books That Ruined Your Childhood · 10/30/15 11:45AM So often, when we look back on our formative years, the memories which scream loudest are the ones marked by fear, death, and adolescent angst. Some of these memories are grounded in reality while others, we’re told to believe, are pure fiction. Yet for many of us, the scary stories we encountered in the books of R.L. Stine, Stephen King, Alvin Schwartz, Anne Rice, and H.P. Lovecraft, among other authors, haunt us still. Becoming Beyoncé Writer J. Randy Taraborrelli: "She’s So Lucky To Have Me as a Biographer" Rich Juzwiak · 10/29/15 11:36AM This week saw the release of the first major, large-scale biography on one of pop music’s biggest and most guarded stars: Beyoncé. The product of hundreds of hours of interviews from dozens of sources, J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Becoming Beyoncé aims to be the definitive chronicle on the creation of an icon. It also suggests that virtually everything Beyoncé has told the public checks out. You won’t find any credence given to pregnancy conspiracy theories or Illuminati affiliations. Beyoncé is portrayed as someone who was deeply secretive from the time she was a child (as one of her elementary school classmates attests), and a shrewd business woman who severs ties not out of vindictiveness but for the sake of her career. If you go into the book thinking Beyoncé is perfect, you will find your suspicions confirmed. Jason Parham · 10/13/15 04:18PM On Tuesday, Marlon James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker Prize in the award’s 47-year history for A Brief History of Seven Killings , an “ expansive and near-mythic survey of his homeland.” Revisit our interview with the author here . "Say What You Will About Apocalypse, You Can Do Your Own Thing": A Conversation With Claire Vaye Watkins Jia Tolentino · 10/09/15 08:00AM Like real women, fictional women are often seen as wish-fulfillment. The “strength” that we look for in a female protagonist is often there for sentimental purposes, and rarely resembles the iron, irradiated accountability that matters in real life, a type of strength that’s like the desert—unsparing and mercurial. Blessedly, this is the milieu of Claire Vaye Watkins, born in Death Valley, daughter of Charles Manson’s chief lieutenant. Her heart-stopping 2012 collection Battleborn opens with a character named Razor Blade Baby, the product of a Family orgy, born when Manson sliced her out. Another story, “Man-O-War,” features a hermit scavenger picking up unused fireworks on the 5th of July and finding, instead, a pregnant teenager, bruised and half dead of heatstroke; what pair could possibly be more feeble, you think at the beginning, and then by the end, you wonder who could ever be so strong. Jason Parham · 10/08/15 10:05AM Belarussian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich became the 14th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. A synthesis of reportage and literature, her work has centered on the Soviet Union through the lens of everyday citizens. “She’s devised a new kind of literary genre,” the Swedish Academy said . Which Truly Gets the ’70s: City on Fire or "We Didn’t Start the Fire"? Tom Scocca · 10/06/15 01:35PM Michiko Kakutani, tireless New York Times book critic, has high praise today for City on Fire , the debut novel by Garth Risk Hallberg. It is, Kakutani writes, “an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s”: Inside the World of the Black Elite: An Interview With Margo Jefferson Jason Parham · 09/29/15 03:10PM Upon the publication of Lawrence Otis Graham’s Our Kind of People in 1999, the New York Times asked, “ Is There a Black Upper Class? ” On the surface, it was a foolhardy question—of course there was, and is, a black upper class—but if you were to peel back its exterior, as Graham did in his book, underneath revealed a world of race leaders: men and women and children who were in a constant “state of self-enhancement.” Here was a place, a land, very few Americans knew about. A Safe Place and a Straitjacket: An Interview With Lauren Groff Jia Tolentino · 09/23/15 12:00PM I blew through the last quarter of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies in the wee hours, gasping. Surprise is rare in literary fiction, which is snobbish with its pleasures, generally picking meditation over movement; surprise is even rarer in novels that run on language as flush, wild and glinting as Groff’s. “Goodness, he would lick her crown to hallux,” thinks teenage Lotto, just before fucking his teenage crush (“hands blistered to blood,” Groff writes; “her eyes overflowed the liner”) in the actual middle of a house fire. Romance, to Lotto’s wife, is like “corn rammed down goose necks, this shit they’d swallowed since they were barely old enough to dress themselves in tulle.” The style is wrought heavily but carefully, and its force is like water—pulling you under, letting you float. The Summer of Simulacra: On Grey and Go Set a Watchman Andrew Hart · 09/22/15 12:00PM On the day the calendar officially turns to fall, the only thing that needs to be said about the state of the novel is this: E.L. James’s Grey —from that time-honored genre of English letters, the shot-for-shot rewrite of an erotic fanfic of a series of young adult vampire novels—was the book of the summer. Which isn’t to say it’s good. The Gawker Review Weekend Reading List [9.19.15] Jason Parham · 09/19/15 10:45AM Wednesday night, before a national audience , presidential candidate and part-time comedian Jeb Bush—son of George H.W., brother to George W., and father to George P.—told a funny story. “There’s one thing I’ll tell you about my brother,” he said, referring to W’s tenure as president from 2001 to 2009,“He kept us safe.” Good one , Jeb! I’m still laughing. Jason Parham · 09/16/15 04:24PM With the recent publication of Dennis Cooper’s visual treatise, Zac’s Haunted House , Claire Fallon at the Huffington Post wonders , “If you write a novel in GIFs, is it still a novel?” No—no it is not. Fall Is Here and So Are Books, Here Are 9 Must-Reads Megan Reynolds · 09/11/15 11:15AM...