Mark Zero's Blog, page 7

Today in the Holocene: Apple's Tablet and the Future of Literature

Literature has always relied on technology. We wouldn’t have the Dead Sea Scrolls had the ancients failed to invent papyrus, just as we wouldn’t have “The Da Vinci Code” if Gutenberg hadn’t come out with movable type.

It is important to bear in mind that technology is not the sworn enemy of literature as Apple prepares to unveil its much-anticipated new tablet computer. Still, the collision of technology and literature in this case may well prove explosive.

Belles-Lettres: The Principles of Uncertainty

The Principles of Uncertainty, Maira Kalman's illustrated memoir, began life as a blog for the New York Times and is now available in a deliciously hefty paperback. Kalman's artwork regularly appears on New Yorker covers, and her oddball illustrations liven up the pages of the most recent edition of Strunk and White's otherwise staid Elements of Style. She has written and illustrated 12 children's books, but The Principles of Uncertainty, despite being whimsical and colorful enough for any...

Library of Babel: Waterland

Graham Swift's Waterland brilliantly chronicles the mid-life crisis of high school history teacher Tom Crick, who makes sense of his life by placing his difficulties in the context of the lessons he is teaching about the French Revolution. What are his difficulties? His wife has gone mad and kidnapped a stranger's baby from a supermarket, which lands her in a psychiatric hospital; his school is cutting its History Department, forcing Tom into early retirement; and his students, led by the...

The Spoiler: Moby-Dick

The whale did it.

Shelf Life: The Quixote Cult

Genaro Gonzalez's The Quixote Cult, a droll coming-of-age novel set in an anonymous Texas town near the Rio Grande, is steeped in drugs, socialist politics and good humor. As a record of Chicano political activism and the struggles of barrio youth against poverty, The Quixote Cult offers an unsimplified glimpse at the intricacies of raza life.

The Quixote Cult describes the exploits of the budding teenage revolutionary De la O, a Chicano hippie, whose mother is illiterate and whose barrio...