Nathan Holic

Category: Books – Contemporary

  • “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.…

  • 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…

  • Deception

    Perhaps Philip Roth’s most daring novel (which is really saying something), “Deception” reads like a giant “Fuck You” to traditional story structure. It is a book composed entirely of post-coital conversation, relying on the dialogue itself and deprived completely of dialogue tags or exposition. Risky? Very. Especially considering the protagonist is a man named Philip…

  • Special Topics in Calamity Physics

    Perhaps I’ve found a new novel to best characterize the writers (and the readers?) of the Millennial Generation. Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” is all at once consuming, engaging, annoying, boring, fun, tiresome, fresh, predictable, clever, and over-clever. In short, it is a Millennial Generation brat; it is the kid who speaks too…

  • Patrimony – Philip Roth

    A thousand student writers in a thousand Creative Writing programs have–upon taking their first Nonfiction course–drafted a memoir about a father dying, or a mother, or a grandparent, or a friend, or a cousin, or a family pet. In the post-grad world, this is referred to without amusement as “The Dead Grandmother Story,” and it…