Nathan Holic

Author: nholic

  • Pre-Post-Racial?

    Adam Mansbach’s “Angry Black White Boy” has been billed as “the first great race novel of the twenty-first century,” and maybe it is. In fact, this novel–the story of a privileged white kid named Macon Detornay, who becomes disgusted with his own white heritage and decides to brand himself a “race traitor” and advocate for…

  • The Great Millennial Novel?

    Finally, I think we have a book worthy of being called the first “Millennial Generation Novel.” Finally! “Attention. Deficit. Disorder.” initially struck me as a gimmicky book, meant to capitalize on the popular Dave Eggers style of mixed-media, mixed-form, mixed-genre fiction. The sentences are short, choppy, and there are constant interruptions, introducing dictionary definitions and…

  • “House of Leaves”: Mixed-Media Fiction or Gimmick Fiction?

    “House of Leaves” falls into the love-it-or-hate-it category of literature, a book all at once intriguing and inventive and mind-blowingly creative…and also gimmicky, needlessly difficult, frustrating, and self-indulgent. It is a book that defies easy genre categorization (just call it “fiction,” and more specifically, “mixed-media/ post-modern fiction,” and don’t try to further label it), but…

  • Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked,” Message Boards, and Wikipedia Pages

    I was recently able to finish reading Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked,” an excellent little novel about music nerds and aging rock stars and women who feel they are past their prime. Great book, highly enjoyable, but also very interesting for how Hornby approaches some of the Millennial concepts/ concerns that I detail on this blog.…

  • It Can’t Happen Here

    While Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is remarkably prescient of the events to come in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the World War II years specifically, and while some of the ideas even transfer well to the early 2000s’ post-9/11 hysteria (the passing of the PATRIOT Act, for instance, and the surrendering…

  • The Right Stuff

    For some reason, I kept putting off “The Right Stuff,” even though I plowed through Wolfe’s 700-page novels and consumed his early essays and articles with great interest. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I’ve never really been interested in space or in astronauts, so I thought it would be a dull and…

  • Duma Key

    It’s been a little while since I’ve read a Stephen King horror novel, and I was really looking forward to a nice escape. But I’m sad to say that I wasn’t entirely pleased with “Duma Key.” King’s two greatest weaknesses, I think, have always been the following: he’ll introduce a character with psychic abilities to…

  • Maps and Legends – Michael Chabon

    In Chabon’s first nonfiction venture, he offers a collection of personal and critical essays, some of which are destined to become seminal pieces on the nature of “genre vs. literary” fiction, on the (as the reader below mentions) “genre-fication” of books in mainstream bookstores, and even on the origins of fan fictions and metafiction (Chabon…

  • Ordinary Genius

    Though I’d never read Addonizio’s poetry before I found this book (“Ordinary Genius” was mailed to me as a desk/review copy for consideration for my Creative Writing courses), I did know that she was popular, edgy, and has a reputation as a “fun” (not dry or pretentious) poet. So I figured, why not see what…

  • Flash Fiction

    The form of flash fiction (or “sudden fiction,” or “short-shorts,” depending on who you ask to describe the form) has always been fascinating to me, but I’ve found that, for every good piece of flash fiction I read, there are two or three stories so bizarre or cryptic that I wonder what the hell the…