Ambush, pounce/pursuit, pursuit

"The thylacine, with its twistable elbow, was more of an ambusher."

I am in the home stretch...

Swarm city

Sam Anderson's sentence of the week.

Light reading catch-up

Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours was so very much the perfect novel of suspense that I felt ready for another installment of Powell: At Lady Molly's.

I enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl quite a bit; it is not exactly my favorite type of book, and I felt that the opening stretch is overly complex in a way that might have made me put the book down and not pick it up again had I not been reading it on my Kindle (where I am as yet reluctant to start something and leave it unfinished, for reasons of digital tidiness), but he is an incredibly good sentence-writer, especially in this world of steampunk fantasy (Mieville!) where sentence-writing is not always a priority, and I'll certainly look out for his other books.

Barry Eisler's Fault Line was fine, but it is not perhaps quite as appealing as his Rain books (I think I enjoyed the Andrew Grant books a bit more than this too - the voice seemed more straightforwardly what I like - I guess I just prefer thrillers written in the first person, all other things being equal).

I enjoyed Catherine Fisher's Incarceron very much indeed, only with the proviso that I do miss in YA fantasy the richness and variety and complexity that can be found in the best adult fantasy (N. K. Jemisin being my best recent discovery in this regard). It is very good, though, and I am pleased to see the sequel is out - arghhhh, not yet available on Kindle, though - I was about to download it and start reading it right now!

"A Sentence is not emotional a paragraph is"

At the Independent, Jenny Landreth celebrates the joys of cold-water swimming.

Ed Park on the book-length sentence - and readers offer more examples.

The dime of the sentence

Wayne Koestenbaum on Susan Sontag (in an essay titled "Perspicuous Consumption" and published in Artforum in March 2005):

Sontag was a shameless apologist for aesthetic pleasure. Accordingly, I revere her essays not only for what they say but for how they say it. The essay, in Sontag’s hands, became perilously interesting, governed by caprice masquerading as commentary. Her capriciousness, like foppish fiction-maverick Ronald Firbank’s, turned on the dime of the sentence, that unit of fidelity to the “now,” to contemporaneous duration. Sentence maven, she enmeshes me still: In her prose’s hands I’m a prisoner of desire, yearning for a literary art that knows no distinction between captive and captor. Such art can be sadomasochistic in its charm, its coldness, and its vulnerability.

Performative sentences

At Bookforum, Jim Shepard reviews Sam Lipsyte's superb new novel The Ask:

Milo's world disappoints him even more, though, and happily for us, he's the scourge of the upwardly mobile everywhere. Lipsyte provides him with firebombing rants about everything from alternative day cares ("They had a smug ideological tinge about them, a minor Red Brigades vibe") to perhaps that fattest of sitting ducks: the self-importance of the hypereducated (his art school classmate won the student prize "for shitting on a Rand McNally atlas to interrogate hegemony"). None of this captures the performative brio of Lipsyte's sentences, which exhilarate by providing a sense of just what's possible when it comes to unbridled thought, unbridled meaning not only startlingly associative but transgressive as well. A paternal pessimist, Milo assesses his young son's prospects: "It was hard to imagine the boy completing kindergarten, remarkably easy to picture him in a tangle of fish knives and sailor cock under some rot-soft pier." There's a surreal giddiness to the resourcefulness of the perversity here, in the face of failure's crushing banality, as if all the mastery unmanageable in life is on display in this secret life: these utterly performative messages in a bottle to the reader.