Non-fiction
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.
Second Murders: Report from the Interior by Paul Auster
In Report from the Interior, Auster describes the impact of his Jewishness on his remembering and subjectivity. He stands apart from the typical American boy he has hitherto imagined himself to be. His younger self does not attempt to resist this separateness. He refuses to blend in with the assumed and compulsory Christianity of his education.
Free, compulsory and secular: Taking God to School by Marion Maddox
Taking God to School is instructive reading for anyone interested in understanding how we have reached the stage where towards a third of students attend private schools, nearly all of a religious character, with many receiving substantial support from the federal government. For Maddox, it has been downhill ever since the high water mark of public school attendance in the late 1970s.
Crowds vs Clouds: Who Owns the Future? & Digital Labor
Eisenlauer identifies a number of predefined paths into which Facebook channels its users’ activities – status updates, comments, ‘likes’, shares – and suggests that in doing so, Facebook moulds the interactions between people to such an extent that, in any conversation between two of its users, it can be said to comprise a ‘third author’.