Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Magazine, February 2012 Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and that thing is [...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Posted in Reviews, tagged Accrington, Jeanette Winterson, memoir, review of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? on February 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Posted in Reviews, tagged Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, One Leg, Mumbai, Mumbai slum, Bombay, Annawandi on January 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Parul Sehgal, O Magazine, January 25, 2011 Annawandi, “a sumpy plug of slum,” is tucked between the Mumbai airport and a fleet of luxury hotels, a rejoinder to the story of the “new,” prospering India. Here on reclaimed bog land, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo spent a little over three years among 3,000 squatters packed [...]
Salvage the Bones
Posted in Reviews, tagged Hurricane Katrina, Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award 2011, review of Salvage the Bones, Salvage the Bones on January 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 30 2011 Job has nothing on 15-year-old Esch. She’s poor and pregnant and plain unlucky. Mama’s dead, Daddy’s a drunk and dinner is Top Ramen every night. Sex is the only thing that has ever come easily to her. When the boys used to take her [...]
A Year in Reading: Parul Sehgal
Posted in Reviews, tagged Best of 2011, John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever on January 1, 2012 | 3 Comments »
Parul Sehgal, The Millions, December 16, 2011 There were many books I admired this year, books I read and reread and recommended. Salvage the Bones is every bit as good as they say it is. And there were groundbreaking narrative nonfiction books about India: Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, and [...]
The Stranger’s Child
Posted in Reviews, tagged Alan Hollinghurst, Bloomsbury, Cecil Valance, Review of The Stranger's Child, The Stranger's Child on November 9, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Parul Sehgal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 1, 2011 “The Stranger’s Child,” Alan Hollinghurst’s first book since “The Line of Beauty,” the 2004 Man Booker Prize winner, is a sly and ravishing masterpiece. The novel skips with indecent ease through 100 years of British political and literary history, concealing its mighty ambition in charm and louche wit. It’s [...]
Hemingway’s Boat
Posted in Reviews, tagged Ernest Hemingway, Gigi Hemingway, Hemingway's Boat, Paul Hendrickson, Pilar, review of Hemingway's Boat on September 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Parul Sehgal, The Plain Dealer, September 18, 2011 Papa can’t rest in peace. Has there been an American author more relentlessly mythologized, psychoanalyzed, and plain pilloried than Ernest Hemingway? He’s been labeled a brute, a bully and a bore. A heartless seducer of women and a closeted homosexual. An absurd cartoon of hypermasculinity and a [...]
Noon
Posted in Reviews, tagged Aatish Taseer, india, Pakistan, Review of Noon on September 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
By Aatish Taseer, Faber & Faber. $25. Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 16 Rehan Tabassum is in a bad way. Although, strictly speaking, the trouble isn’t of his making. He’s just got that kind of family — prone to falling in love with the servants, scheming against one another, messing with [...]
The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India
Posted in Reviews, tagged Arindam Chaudhuri, liberalization, review of The Beautiful and the Damned, Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned, the new India on September 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Sept/Oct/Nov 2011 India’s economic ascent has launched a flurry of books, most of them touting neoliberalism’s power to not only propel the country out of poverty but to chase away its unsightly caste and class divisions, its nasty penchant for pogroms and female feticide. Siddhartha Deb’s very fine The Beautiful and the Damned tells [...]
Beautiful Monsters: A review of The Art of Cruelty
Posted in Reviews, tagged Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker, Maggie Nelson, review of The Art of Cruelty, Sylvia Plath, The Art of Cruelty on August 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Bookforum, Summer 2o11 Take an apartment. Trash it thoroughly. Strip. Smear yourself with blood, bind your wrists, and bend over a table. Wait for your friends to discover your “corpse.” Too much? Take a city sidewalk. Take a bucket of “blood.” Splatter. Hide. Look at people looking at the “blood.” How much is too much? [...]
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
Posted in Reviews, tagged Daniel Malakov, Janet Malcolm, Mazoltuv Borukhova, Mikhail Mallayev, review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills on April 16, 2011 | 2 Comments »
by Janet Malcolm (Yale Univ.) Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Apr. 12, 2011 Janet Malcolm is to malice what Wordsworth was to daffodils. In nine previous books, she’s so thoroughly, so indelibly investigated a certain breed of malice—the kind that festers in the writer-subject relationship—that it ought to bear her name. Malice is journalism’s “animating impulse,” she [...]
