Salon.com > Maud Newton

Meet the Flannery O’Connor of the Internet age

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:59:00 +0000

Ellen Ullman is a novelist, critic and computer programmer so well known for her incisive, highly personal writing on technology that when her latest novel "By Blood" appeared, even the New York Times was surprised to discover that it’s set long before the Web, in Zodiac Killer–era San Francisco, and doesn’t involve computers at all. The narrator, a disgraced professor — “the spawn of Kafka and Krafft-Ebing, squirrelly and vaguely deviant,” as Parul Sehgal has said — rents an office in a building straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story and soon becomes obsessed with the woman whose therapy sessions he hears through the wall.

A cool new coin app

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:15:00 +0000

If the Euro falls, what should the coins of Greece, Spain, Italy and the rest of the member states look like? The Money Museum’s Coins app, with its high-definition photos of ancient and modern currencies, offers a lot of ideas.

I’m particularly fond of this impractical dolphin coin, which dates to 480 B.C. in the Greek City of Olbia (and shows that the Ichthys — the Christian fish symbol — wasn’t as unique as it seems now). You would definitely always be able to find it by touch in your pocket.

When actors read poetry

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Words That Burn, a poetry app, includes audio and video from the late writer Josephine Hart’s Poetry Hour at the British Library. Beginning in 2004, Hart devoted an evening each month to a poet or two, “introducing and setting their poems in the context of their life,” and staging readings of the work from actors like Dominic West, Harold Pinter and Elizabeth McGovern.

The idea, Hart said, was that understanding “‘the life and philosophy of the poet illuminates the poetry,” which “readings by some of our finest actors then ignite.” In a video introduction, Hart contends that poetry is “the highest form of language, without a doubt.”

Words That Burn features 15 poets, and many more pairings: Dominic West reads Percy Shelley and Robert Lowell; Juliet Stevenson reads Emily Dickinson; Ralph Fiennes reads W.H. Auden. Harriet Walter reads Sylvia Plath; Charles Dance reads Elizabeth Bishop; Elizabeth McGovern reads Lowell and Marianne Moore; and so on. And the app is free, created by the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation in her memory.

Is Adam Levin the new David Foster Wallace?

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:20:00 +0000

Adam Levin's dark, funny, and deeply provocative first novel, "The Instructions," comprises the scriptures of one Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, an impossibly articulate ten-year old who might or might not be the messiah. When I say "impossibly," I do mean impossibly, but Gurion is no cutesy child hero. He shares with Oskar Schell -- the young, tambourine-playing pacifist vegan of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" -- a fixation on the horrors of the past, and like Schell's his story is propelled by a series of unlikely, seemingly symbolic coincidences. Here, though, there is no redemption, only confusion and violence -- an indictment of tribe mentality, and of the concept of being "chosen."

“Muriel Spark: The Biography”: A fearless novelist, betrayed

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:21:00 +0000

At age forty-three, the witty, exacting, and wholly original Muriel Spark became known to American readers when The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to her sixth and most celebrated novel,"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". Brodie, a magnetic and domineering schoolteacher, selects a group of girls to mold into the "crème de la crème" -- young women made in her image who will recognize their prime when it arrives and know how to exploit it. Propping up their history textbooks for appearances as she recounts a pre-war love affair, trailing after her through strange neighborhoods on the way to plays and picnics, Miss Brodie's chosen pupils idolize her -- until the danger of her manipulations becomes clear.