Non-fiction
Forms of surveillance: Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life by Stephen Parker
I traversed this colossal biography for weeks, tearing along with Parker, who seemed to leave no stone unturned (including his subject’s kidney stones). Its emphasis on Brecht’s genius and illnesses, its build-up of a multitude of medical, sexual, psychological, literary, intellectual, political and historical stories, produces a kind of Gulliverian perspective: Parker’s Brecht is like a huge Swiftian creature taking prodigious strides through monstrous times.
Portrait of the Theorist as a Young Man: The Double Life of Paul de Man
The wager behind Barish’s book is twofold. Firstly, the book assumes that understanding de Man’s early life will cast some light on his subsequent work as a scholar and theorist. Secondly, and more pressingly, there is the possibility that de Man himself might emerge as a genuine ‘character’; that enough smaller transgressions and indiscretions can be clustered around the fact of collaboration to flesh out a coherent portrait of an anti-hero who never escapes his psychological and moral flaws.
The abstractions of history: Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The twin pillars of Piketty’s return to political economy are articulated as a pair of twin needs: the need for big data and for the long view. Zeitgeist or conjuncture, take your pick: Capital in the Twenty-First Century is central to it. But it is, of course, not alone. The 2008 financial crisis and the seemingly interminable effort to consign the period it inaugurated to the past has led to a new hearing for a variety of works not simply in political economy, but within an avowedly Marxist tradition.
Sorry I’m late: Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life
The task faced by Lee, Fitzgerald’s first biographer, whose output includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, is to make sense of these apparent disjunctures in the figure of the writer: her intellect and acerbic wit and insight; her vulnerabilities and the prosaic and at times dismal matter of her life; the contradictions and intricacies of her personal and public lives in the face of more than the usual amount of enigma, silence and secrecy.
Regimes of reading: The Practice of Value by John Frow
The Practice of Value: Essays on Literature in Cultural Studies articulates, with precision and clarity, the book’s argument and content. This is a book specifically about doing value or essaying – from a Latin root, which comes to English via Old French, meaning ‘weighing’ – the matter of literature from the perspective of cultural studies.
Playing the Part, Telling the Tale: Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
In the end, Playing the Whore is a book is about language, and in particular the way we use it to construct sex work as a field of knowledge and limit the control sex workers have over their own lives. It is about identifying sex work, not as something driven by male desire, but by the sex worker’s needs for housing, nourishment, access to healthcare, and even holiday time.
Bad Faith: Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin
This short but ambitious book is more revealing of its author’s shortcomings than anything I have read by him. Notwithstanding its posthumous publication and the fact that, had he lived a bit longer, Dworkin may have sharpened up his arguments, I emerged from it with a powerful sense that he was pulling a philosophical fast one.