The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.
An eclectic collection about topics related to our current position in the Anthropocene.
In a wide-ranging series of essays, Wilk, author of the acclaimed novel Oval, examines a variety of genre-bending creative works. She derives her title from a Margaret Atwood story about how a missing girl in a liminal person-plant transition becomes part of the landscape. Wilk begins with “what it means to be a person in an age of drastic ecosystem decline—of planetary extinction.” A sense of urgency pervaded what she calls the early systems novels of DeLillo, Coover, Pynchon, and Gaddis, which manipulated or upended genre conventions. Drawing on works by H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Powers, among others, Wilk explores what constitutes weirdness, eeriness, and ecosystems in fiction. She seeks to understand death as a “kind of life through landscape,” including the effects of a toxic environment on people and art as employed in Jenny Hval’s novel Paradise Rot and Karen Russell’s short story “The Bad Graft,” which follows “an unwanted, unexpected, erotic interspecies incursion.” The “impossible terrain” of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Wilk notes, is a good example of “narratives reflecting the transformations of the drastically changing planet.” Pandemic and apocalyptic stories “offer a lot for comprehending our current situation,” while dystopian landscapes “rendered in familiar fashions” can still be titillating or terrifying. Science fiction, Wilk contends, has found its own utopian landscapes in steampunk, solarpunk, cyberpunk, and films like Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. In the latter part of the book, the author verges off into some robust issues about empathy and virtual reality as a “trauma machine” as well as her own intriguing participation in the improvisational theater of a vampire larp (live action role-playing). Wilk concludes with autobiographical reflections on Oval, a larp based on it, and her writing methods.
The author makes us look at the world and speculative creations in a new, defamiliarized way.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59376-715-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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