An uproarious, hard-boiled modern fable of corporate life, sex, and race in America, Helen DeWitt'sLightning Rods brims with the satiric energy of Nathanael West and the philosophic import of an Aristophanic comedy of ideas. Her wild yarn is second cousin to the spirit of Mel Brooks and the hilarious reality-blurring of Being John Malkovich. Dewitt continues to take the novel into new realms of storytelling -- as the timeliness of Lightning Rods crosses over into timelessness.
An uproarious, hard-boiled modern fable of corporate life, sex, and race in America, Helen DeWitt'sLightning Rods brims with the satiric ener...
Helen DeWitt's 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was -destined to become a cult classic- (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights in twenty countries, so -Why not just, 'destined to become a classic?'- (Garth Risk Hallberg) And why must cultists tell the uninitiated it has nothing to do with Tom Cruise?
Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed...
Helen DeWitt's 2000 debut, The Last Samurai, was -destined to become a cult classic- (Miramax). The enterprising publisher sold the rights...
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove...
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yo...