ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015… because you’re worth it. I love Daily Savings Time. No matter what the weather, it makes me feel like spring is here!!!— Danielle Steel (@daniellesteel) March 10, 2015 Naomi Klein on climate change… In an edited excerpt from her new book This Changes Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2014) over at the Guardian, Klein debunks a series of clichés about our collective failure to tackle climate change (it’s too hard, politically and technologically; we’re screwed anyway…) and argues forcefully for action. After all, the stakes, as she points out, couldn’t be much higher: “entire nations could be saved from the waves.” So, what’s wrong with us? It’s Klein’s contention that “market fundamentalism,” the reigning ideology for the entire period of time since the scope of the global-warming threat became apparent, has “systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.” Globalization and its attendant forces have accelerated global warming and left us in an appalling bind: “the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic […]

The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell Simon & Schuster, 2015; 448pp “The search for information about the Vatican is maddening,” writes Ian Caldwell, “not because that information is scarce but because it’s oceanic, bottomless, centuries deep — and because, just when you think you’re on the cusp of a discovery, you drop head-first into the abyss.” Caldwell’s new novel, which arrived in bookstores this week a decade after his blockbusting debut, The Rule of Four (Random House, 2004), is set almost entirely within the forty-four hectares of the Vatican. Accurate information, what Caldwell calls “near-photographic realism,” is therefore essential for grounding a thriller whose mechanics rely on precise knowledge of everything from canonical law to the subtle variations in the Synoptic Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection. Though set in 2004, in the last days of the papacy of John Paul II, this is still a world of spooky priests, Kafkaesque surveillance, and ancient grudges breaking to new mutiny, reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s medieval masterpiece The Name of the Rose (1983). Our narrator-hero is the young Eastern priest Father Alex Andreou, who lives in the Vatican’s Belvedere Palace (“because in Italian you can call anything a palace”) with his young son, Peter. Unhappily separated from his wife, Mona, he […]

ReadEasy is a new feature for 2015 — because life’s hard enough already, amIright? https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/570321074988175360 Last Wednesday Tom McCarthy joined Dennis Lim, director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to discuss his new novel, Satin Island (Knopf, 2015), and to screen two avant-garde classics he considers to be in conversation with it: Antony Balch’s 1963 Towers Open Fire, starring William S. Burroughs, and Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 hijacking documentary, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. It was an extraordinary evening, with McCarthy and Grimonprez (a surprise and very welcome additional guest) at ease in an eclectic and ever-expanding frame of reference: Marvell, Spinoza, Cocteau, Tarkovsky, Lévi-Strauss, Warhol… Quoting Don DeLillo, in Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Grimonprez’s narrators comment on the capacity of terrorists for “raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.” While the figure of the terrorist haunted McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder (2005), it’s the figure of the Writer, Inc. — in the form of corporate anthropologist U. — who’s at the center of Satin Island. The migration of ideas from universities into corporations, appalling to some, is evident in the metaphors for contemporary being that emerge in U.’s digressive narration: metadata, buffering, and so on. It’s an excellent novel. Grimonprez and McCarthy also screened the promotional short […]

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy does the hard work so you don’t have to. Twenty minutes ago, I pressed SEND on my new book. NOW what shall I do?— Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) February 22, 2015 Also, totally read our reviews of Oscar-winning movies Boyhood, Whiplash, and Ida. Wanna see tomorrow’s prize-winners today? Buy tickets for No Return, our next Seriously Entertaining show at City Winery NYC, on March 9. Guests include horror maestro R.L. Stine (who we interviewed here), author and journalist Ben Yagoda (whose new book The B-Side we just reviewed), novelist Ian Caldwell, poet A.E. Stallings, and Colbert Report and SNL writer Meredith Scardino. Is everyone watching the Oscars? Best line so far: "it takes balls to wear a dress like that."— Anne Rice (@AnneRiceAuthor) February 23, 2015 “How swiftly it both dulls the senses and raises your ire”: Gary Shteyngart watches Russian TV for a week… “With the exception of fishing, soccer and the Orthodox Church,” writes Shteyngart in the New York Times Magazine, “few things are taken more seriously in Russia than Eurovision.” This is why, he says, 2014 winner Conchita Wurst, an Austrian drag queen, met with such violent disgust in Russia, a country which refuses “to succumb to the rest of the world’s wimpy notions of tolerance.” New Year’s Eve on Russian TV […]

Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda; translated by Jonathan Reeder Hogarth, 2015; 544pp Bonita Avenue is a social-realist comedy and a nightmare thriller. Author Peter Buwalda uses three characters, each tunnel-visioned in their own way, to tell a claustrophobic and totally compelling family saga. We discover very early on where it’s all headed; to read Bonita Avenue is like being locked in the trunk of a car and driven forty miles of bad road at high speed to get there. The suspense lies in the how of it all, and Buwalda, with his gruesome, familicidal imagination, does not disappoint. Siem Sigerius is a sort of Dutch übermensch: judoka and mathematician of distinction; incipient politician; rector at Tubantia University. When we first meet him, in 1996, he’s in his fifties, and a man so popular that even a nude photo of him in the national press — sagging belly, leaping into water; snapped in a moment of college-sport hijinks — cannot scratch his reputation. As Michael Caine might say, though, he’s a big man but he’s out of shape. And out of joint, too, for he’s come to suspect that his stepdaughter, Joni, is the star attraction of a porn site he’s a member of. As the plot hurtles along, switching perspectives […]