Author: GR

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‘Catch the Devil’ by Pamela Colloff

Paul Skalnik, writes journalist and debut author Colloff, “had an instinct for what people wanted to hear,” an essential talent for a successful con man. And successful Skalnik was: He married nine times, sometimes simultaneously, and bilked his wives and countless other people out of money, cars, jewelry, real estate, whatever he could steal. He did so while claiming to be many things that he was not: an ace Marine Corps fighter pilot who had been shot down over Vietnam, a wealthy lawyer temporarily short of cash thanks to big investments, a University of Texas star football player grounded by injury, a C-suite captain of industry. Somehow people fell for it, right and left. But more than that, and at a more depraved level of pathology, Skalnik sexually assaulted numerous women and girls, including a “slight and freckled seventh grader.” All these crimes added up to a constant series of jail and prison terms, and there, Colloff chronicles, Skalnik found his truest métier as an informant, pinning murders, drug trafficking charges, and countless other crimes on fellow inmates whom he swore under testimony had confessed to him. Read more

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‘It Will Come Back to You’ by Sigrid Nunez

One of our best, smartest, funniest authors has just published her first collection of short stories at age seventy-five … The volume mixes tone and content: its easy intimacy and impression of casualness exist in fascinating counterpoint to its philosophical heft, existential probing, and sagacious maturity. These stories can be at once effervescent and weighty, straightforward and unsettling, hilarious and eerie … Nunez’s capacity to startle, surprise, even shock her readers is deployed to extraordinary effect in many of the stories collected here. We never end up where we began with a Nunez story … Nunez’s fiction doesn’t shy away from embittering things or from confronting grief head-on, even as it offers its readers humor, warmth, sweetness — comfort in the wake of the truth. Read more

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Dissident Hong Kong Bookseller Lam Wing-kee Dies Aged 70

He was one of several booksellers detained in 2015 after selling material critical of the political elite on China’s mainland. He fled to Taiwan – which is seen by Beijing as a renegade province that must be reunited – in 2019 for fear he would be sent back to China under Hong Kong’s proposed extradition bill. Taiwan’s authorities said at the time that the reopening of Lam’s Causeway Bay Books bookshop was a symbol of democracy and freedom on the island. Read more

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The American City Where Almost Everyone Seems To Be Writing a Book

The chief reason for Iowa City’s bookish demeanor celebrates its 90th anniversary this year; in 1936, the town’s University of Iowa set up the first creative writing degree in the United States, after decades of nurturing creative writing talent as part of wider academic programs. Today, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is globally famous, with a roster of former faculty and alumni that reads like a who’s who of modern American letters — Kurt Vonnegut, Curtis Sittenfeld, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, to name a few. The Pulitzers and National Book Awards for alumni continue to stack up and in 2008, the town was named America’s first UNESCO City of Literature. Read more

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‘Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ by Paul Tremblay

Whether he’s playing with traditional novelistic forms, holding conversations with characters across time, or pushing his stories to their bleakest and strangest possible conclusions (if they have concrete conclusions at all) Tremblay is a daring novelist, never playing it safe for his audience or himself. The author of A Head Full of Ghosts, Horror Movie, and more is always pushing for something in his fiction, digging into the core of an issue until he finds its bloody, beating heart. Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, Tremblay’s latest novel, is no different. From the title alone you might surmise certain things about the narrative, from its Philip K. Dick influence to its sci-fi-horror premise, and you’d be right. But Tremblay always pushes beyond those initial assumptions, and here we get not just a gripping sci-fi-horror showcase, but something much stranger and more profound: An exploration of what it means to be human, fragile bodies and all, in the age of AI. Read more

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‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner Wins Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

American writer Ben Lerner has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for Transcription, a novel exploring technology and memory. In nonfiction, the prize went to Karen Bartlett for The Escape from Kabul, which looks at Afghan women lawyers who came under threat after the fall of Kabul in 2021. Read more

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