Ron Slate's blog

September 1st, 2010

on One More Story, short stories by Ingo Schulze (Knopf)

Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962. Now living in Berlin, he is often described as the writer most representative of the united Germany. Two years ago he visited Dresden, located in what used to be the GDR. “It was a very sobering experience,” he said in a recent interview. “The whole Disneyfication of the city.

August 16th, 2010

on Theatre, essays by David Mamet (Faber and Faber / Farrar Straus Giroux)

David Mamet’s 1997 Paris Review interview includes this exchange:

“Interviewer:
Is there a moment in one of your plays that you really didn’t know was there?
Mamet:

August 12th, 2010

on Shoulder Season, poems by Ange Mlinko (Coffee House Press)

“Postmodernism has an allergy to depth,” sneezed Terry Eagleton in an otherwise thoughtful article in The Guardian a few years ago. Profundity for Eagleton requires language working at a “deep moral or metaphysical level,” but the “centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive” creature who emerges from postmodernism cannot or refuses to go deep.

August 2nd, 2010

on 03, a novella by Jean-Christophe Valtat, trans. from the French by Mitzi Angel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The narrator of 03, now in his mid-40’s, begins by recalling the moment he spotted a “slightly retarded” girl (“it was harder to guess her age”) waiting at a bus stop in the dispiriting town of Montpérilleux. He was 18.

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