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Articles by Andrew Ervin
‘Lightbreakers’ is a moving, inventive novel about physics, time and love
The term “scientific fiction,” a subtle adjustment to science fiction, is often used to describe weighty literary novels about cutting-edge technologies and big ideas, and it’s an apt way to describe Aja Gabel’s riveting second novel, “Lightbreakers.” Its trafficking in theoretical and experimental physics comes in service of a moving story about art, time, loss and the possibility of love.
‘Lightbreakers’ is a moving, inventive novel about physics, time and love
‘Lightbreakers’ is a moving, inventive novel about physics, time and love (washingtonpost.com) ‘Lightbreakers’ is a moving, inventive novel about physics, time and love By Andrew Ervin 2025112419452900 The term "scientific fiction," a subtle adjustment to science fiction, is often used to describe weighty literary novels about cutting-edge technologies and big ideas, and it's an apt way to describe Aja Gabel's riveting second novel, "Lightbreakers." Its trafficking in theoretical and...
Is This the First-Ever English Language Review of László Krasznahorkai?
My love of Hungarian literature began in 1994, when my college girlfriend moved to Budapest to study music at the Liszt Academy and I followed her a few months later. We planned to stay for nine months, the maximum length of a return ticket at that time, and ended up staying for close to five years. While there, I contributed to two English-language newspapers and eventually took a job in the nascent Internet industry.
Tending to the Garden of American Democracy is Hard and Thankless Work
In Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 novel Being There, a simple gardener named Chance is mistaken for a political guru and quickly wows the Washington D.C. power brokers and kingmakers. It’s a marvelous study of how authority can so often be doled out to those least suited for it. I mean, look around. My father died the same November morning that we got the calamitous results of the most recent presidential election, and I can still hear his voice.
Dorothy Tses Owlish
Dorothy Tse Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce Owlish (Graywolf, 2023) Owlish, the second novel by the Hong Kong-based author Dorothy Tse, features a fifty-year-old scholar named Professor Q, a “hack teacher in a debased, cultureless city” called Nevers. His academic career has stalled and his marriage isn’t fairing much better. We do learn early on, however, that he’s enjoying his first extramarital affair and has recently gotten back in touch with a mysterious old friend, Owlish.
Kelly Link Rethinks Familiar Patterns
Kelly Link’s fiction is where I go to get lost. Inspired by classic fables, the seven stories in her new collection White Cat, Black Dog feel timeless while being rooted firmly in our IRL world. “Each story in the collection is a response or entanglement with a fairytale,” Link told me. “Some are closer to retellings, and some just borrow structures or bits.” In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” a man trapped in a blizzard finds refuge at a marijuana farm tended to by talking cats.
Kelly Link Rethinks Familiar Patterns
Kelly Link’s fiction is where I go to get lost. Inspired by classic fables, the seven stories in her new collection White Cat, Black Dog feel timeless while being rooted firmly in our IRL world. “Each story in the collection is a response or entanglement with a fairytale,” Link told me. “Some are closer to retellings, and some just borrow structures or bits.” In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” a man trapped in a blizzard finds refuge at a marijuana farm tended to by talking cats.
Franz Kafka: The Drawings
Andreas Kilcher, ed. Franz Kafka: The Drawings (Yale University Press, 2022) While playing Dungeons & Dragons, either online or around the table with friends. While on hold yet again with Lowe’s customer service. While in another Zoom meeting and another goddamn Zoom meeting after that one. I’m always doodling so I now keep pencils, index cards, and, most importantly, erasers in every room of the house.
Cormac McCarthy’s
Cormac McCarthy’s most memorable characters to date are the ones who operate beyond traditional good-versus-evil morality. The Judge in Blood Meridian comes to mind, of course, and you can bet your lucky quarter that Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men does as well. We can now count Alicia Western among their illustrious company, even if—especially if—her violence is directed inward instead.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris
Books Cormac McCarthy The Passenger (Knopf, 2022) Stella Maris (Knopf, 2022) Cormac McCarthy’s most memorable characters to date are the ones who operate beyond traditional good-versus-evil morality. The Judge in Blood Meridian comes to mind, of course, and you can bet your lucky quarter that Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men does as well. We can now count Alicia Western among their illustrious company, even if—especially if—her violence is directed inward instead.
In Paul Theroux’s New Novel, a Sibling Rivalry Boils Over
THE BAD ANGEL BROTHERS, by Paul Theroux Tolstoy was wrong. There are no happy families, only less unhappy ones. At least that’s one takeaway from Paul Theroux’s latest novel. Born in 1941, and best known for “The Mosquito Coast,” Theroux is nothing if not productive. “The Bad Angel Brothers” is his 33rd work of fiction and 53rd book overall. In it, the fierce rivalry between two siblings comes laden with jealousy, betrayal and an almost mythic lust for vengeance.
Debut Novels About Seamy Underbellies and Dark Turns
The Shortlist Oct. 7, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET THE NIGHTWORKERS By Brian Selfon 308 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27. Image By the end of the first chapter of “The Nightworkers,” a painter and fentanyl dealer named Emil Scott is dead. To tell us how he ended up that way, Selfon’s thriller takes us back in time to describe a rogues’ gallery of ex-cons and petty crooks involved in or circling around a money-laundering operation in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Lost Tomb of the Bitchin' Chimera - An Official Dead Milkmen RPG Module - Character Sheet
Quick Preview /gs_flipbook/flip.php?xml=/demo_xml/320653.xml&w=500&h=193 Full‑size Preview https://watermark.drivethrurpg.com/pdf_previews/320653-sample.pdf ADD TO WISHLIST > Suggested Price $0.99 Severed Books will release an officially licensed Dead Milkmen RPG module this summer. Written by Andrew Ervin. Pay what you want. All profit for this character sheet will be donated to the William Way LBGT Community Center in Philadelphia, PA. Customers Who Bought this Title also Purchased
Rounding Up the Spies of World War II in 4 New Books
Shortlist Feb. 11, 2020 AN IMPECCABLE SPY Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent By Owen Matthews 435 pp. Bloomsbury. $30. Richard Sorge was born in 1895 to a well-to-do German family living in the Russian oil boomtown of Baku. After a series of injuries while fighting on the Eastern Front, he accepted an assignment at Comintern headquarters in Moscow.
The Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Defies Easy Genre Categorization
Genre is often the least interesting way to describe a work of art. To declare a story “literary” or “science fiction” or “fantasy” strikes me first and foremost as a commercial designation, one intended to make it easier to market and perchance to sell. And yet I know that genre is a necessary evil and I find myself fascinated—if not obsessed—by the taxonomies that arise even while I attempt to resist them in my own fiction. What is this? I ask myself, all the time, about what I’m writing.
George Orwell and More in the Borderlands of Life and Death
I’d like to share with you excerpts from two consecutive entries in George Orwell’s Diaries. These were written on Scotland’s Isle of Jura, where he had gone off the grid in an attempt to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four. On August 16, 1947, he wrote: Last night saw the northern lights for the first time. Long streaks of white stuff, like cloud, forming an arc in the sky, & every now & then an extraordinary flickering passing over them, as though a searchlight were playing upon them.
Robert Macfarlane Finds a Little Hope in the World's Darkest Places
The Author of Underland Talks to Andrew Ervin Below the mine shaft roads It will all unfold There’s a world going on Underground –Tom Waits, “Underground“ (1983) * In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, the English naturalist and adventurer Robert Macfarlane has described his sometimes harrowing personal experiences beneath the surface of the earth.
From Northland to Underland, What We Risk Losing
I. An epoch doesn’t change with the turning of a calendar page. We can’t distinguish one zeitgeist from the next until decades or perhaps even centuries later. Or at least that used to be the case. Now the destruction of our planet is occurring in real time right in front of our sunburnt noses. Nevertheless, as of today the International Commission on Stratigraphy has not yet added our monstrous Anthropocene age to the Geologic Time Scale.
Now Everything in the World Was Going to Be Rethought: A Conversation with Ann Beattie
A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, Ann Beattie’s twenty-first book, is the work of a master storyteller at the height of her talents. In it, a young man named Ben attempts to make sense of his life in the years after 9/11 and after graduating from the prestigious Bailey Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire. It’s a remarkable novel that feels so utterly real that it defies convention. It works the way life works, which is to say with misdirection and events that feel random but probably aren’t.
A First Novel Exposes the Hollow Core of the Global Big Ideas Industry
Fiction Feb. 5, 2019 SAME SAME By Peter Mendelsund The renowned graphic designer Peter Mendelsund’s first novel manages to be breezy and profound in equal measure. That balance is — as the programmers say — a feature and not a bug, and it turns this homage to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” into a clever metafictional sendup of artists’ retreats and tech-industry think tanks.
Review | Decades after a volatile life and a brutal death, a Japanese writer is back in the spotlight
(Vintage) Yukio Mishima’s 1961 novel “The Frolic of the Beasts,” a compelling tale of love and violence, has only now appeared in English for the first time. Admirers of the enigmatic Japanese master have reason to rejoice. Those still unfamiliar with his work might very well have a new entryway to one of the most vital — and troubling — literary voices of the 20th century.
Tolkien’s ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ final book
The publication of The Fall of Gondolin, at long last, represents the conclusion of a loose trilogy set in the Elder Days of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional realm of Middle-earth. As with the posthumously published The Children of Húrin and Beren and Lúthien, this entry has been painstakingly and, clearly, lovingly edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s latest posthumous book may actually be the last
The publication of "The Fall of Gondolin," at long last, represents the conclusion of a loose trilogy set in the Elder Days of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional realm of Middle-earth. As with the posthumously published "The Children of Húrin" and "Beren and Lúthien," this entry has been painstakingly and, clearly, lovingly edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien.
J.R.R. Tolkien's latest book might be his last
The publication of “The Fall of Gondolin,” at long last, represents the conclusion of a loose trilogy set in the Elder Days of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional realm of Middle-earth. As with the posthumously published “The Children of Húrin” and “Beren and Lúthien,” this entry has been painstakingly and, clearly, lovingly edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s latest book might be his last
The publication of “The Fall of Gondolin,” at long last, represents the conclusion of a loose trilogy set in the Elder Days of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional realm of Middle-earth. As with the posthumously published “The Children of Húrin” and “Beren and Lúthien,” this entry has been painstakingly and, clearly, lovingly edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien.
Review | J.R.R. Tolkien’s latest posthumous book may actually be the last
The publication of “The Fall of Gondolin,” at long last, represents the conclusion of a loose trilogy set in the Elder Days of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional realm of Middle-earth. As with the posthumously published “The Children of Húrin” and “Beren and Lúthien,” this entry has been painstakingly and, clearly, lovingly edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien.
There Was No Up or Down: A Conversation with Kate Christensen
Kate Christensen’s harrowing new novel, The Last Cruise, follows three characters, each more compelling than the previous, as they find themselves adrift in a sea of trouble. Mick is a Hungarian chef working in the bowels of a less-than-luxurious ocean liner making its way from California to Hawaii. Miriam is a violinist in the aging string quartet hired to entertain the passengers, which includes Christine, a farmer from Maine in need of a change.
The Vocabulary of Tourism: An Interview with Laura van den Berg
In The Third Hotel, Laura van den Berg’s phantasmagoric fourth book, a recently widowed woman named Clare travels alone to Havana to attend the Festival of New Latin American Cinema. There, she sees her deceased husband Richard and everything she knew—or thought she knew—about their marriage is thrown into turmoil. It’s the perfect premise for a novel that, in van den Berg’s hands, is both emotionally nuanced and philosophically profound.
Bored in Brazil: Is She the 21st-Century Ugly American?
The novel of the ugly American living abroad has bloomed into a genre all its own, one I happen to devour with relish. Among my favorites are Charles Portis’s “Gringos,” Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station” and Nell Zink’s “The Wallcreeper.” Ian MacKenzie’s second novel arrives as a worthy addition to that list. “Feast Days” is told from the point of view of the bored American wife of an investment banker newly arrived in São Paulo.
Put Down the Controller: Five Novels About Video Games
I’ve recently been seeing more fiction writers like myself turning to video games for inspiration. The ways that books and video games can tell us stories aren’t as different as I used to think. Both require intense concentration and thoughtful interaction, albeit in different ways. Both also insist upon our willingness to escape from the workaday world in order to step into one built word by word or bit by bit by somebody else.
Tales of the Unhinged: A Poet’s Short-Story Collection
DISASTERS IN THE FIRST WORLD Stories By Olivia Clare 188 pp. Black Cat. Paper, $16. The best of the 13 stories in Olivia Clare’s debut collection flout convention and work in mysterious ways. Two in particular — “Pétur” and “The Visigoths” — will probably be anthologized and taught and cherished for years to come. They’re so well crafted, in fact, that the rest of “Disasters in the First World” pales in comparison. But even the lesser entries manage to flicker with moments of rare insight and nuance.
Book Excerpt: Yes, Videogames Are Serious Art. Tim Schafer's Career Proves It
One of America’s greatest living artists sits in a former clog factory in San Francisco. Tim Schafer’s videogame career has spanned every platform from the Commodore 64 to the current generation of consoles. Along the way, his extraordinary talents as a writer, puzzle maker, and industry rabble-rouser have consistently pushed the entire medium forward. Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, in particular, are unchallenged classics.
Talking to Madison Smartt Bell About His New Novel, “Behind the Moon”
Linear time doesn’t exist in Madison Smartt Bell’s new fever dream of a novel Behind the Moon, at least not for long. The fractured narrative centers on a young woman named Julie who falls into a deep Badlands cave while fleeing would-be rapists. In her liminal, un-, or semi-conscious state, she’s able to interact with the prehistoric paintings on the cave walls.
A Journey Through the Strange, Scary, and Awe-Awakening World of Video Games
I was born in 1982, the same year the Atari 2600 went on sale. My dad waited until I was older and could fully appreciate it before purchasing the system for me. That purchase would shape my life more than he anticipated. In his spare time, we would sit in front of the TV together and play Tank and Pong and attempt to decipher the disastrously designed E.T. For my dad, it barely ranked as a hobby. He was more interested in fishing and grilling.
Founding Fathers and Pagan Goddesses – Electric Literature
Iceland’s sole Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) published twenty-two novels, among many other things, during his long career. I’ve not read all of them, but of those I have Kristnihald undir Jökli strikes me as by far his strangest, his funniest, and his most radical. Susan Sontag once declared, “It is like nothing else Laxness ever wrote” and I’ll take her word for it. I’m also told that it was the last novel he completed before turning to playwriting.
Geek Reads: If Trees Could Scream
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?” the humorist Jack Handey once asked. “We might,” he admitted, “if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.” In his superb The Hidden Life of Trees, the German forester Peter Wohlleben indicates there may be some truth in Handey’s joke.
Book Review: Alan Moore’s sprawling new epic, “Jerusalem”
By Andrew Ervin, Special to The Washington Post Over the past four decades, Alan Moore has earned a reputation — and a massive, worldwide audience — as a historian and champion of the macabre. In his legendary comics “V for Vendetta,” “Watchmen” and “From Hell,” the natural and the supernatural can be difficult to distinguish. Now, he’s published a new novel, “Jerusalem,”which is epic in scope and phantasmagoric to its briny core.
Alan Moore’s sprawling new epic, ‘Jerusalem’
Over the past four decades, Alan Moore has earned a reputation — and a massive, worldwide audience — as a historian and champion of the macabre. In his legendary comics “V for Vendetta,” “Watchmen” and “From Hell,” the natural and the supernatural can be difficult to distinguish. Now, he’s published a new novel, “Jerusalem,” which is epic in scope and phantasmagorical to its briny core. It takes place over 1,000 years in the English town of Northampton, also known here as the Boroughs.
‘Katherine Carlyle,’ by Rupert Thomson
Toward the end of “Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley’s mad scientist travels across Europe in pursuit of his monstrous creation. “Guided by a slight clue,” he tells us, “I followed the windings of the Rhone, but vainly.” His desire for revenge — and for closure — takes him across the Mediterranean and through Russia and Asia, to what may have felt like the very ends of the earth.
You Can Feel It Like a Demon, Swallowing You Slow: An Interview with Marlon James
Marlon James is no longer a promising writer. He’s no longer a writer of enormous potential. That’s because his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings places him securely among our most vital contemporary voices. An author’s third novel often seems to make or break a writer’s career. Think The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Corrections.
Almosting a Joycean Listicle: 10 Books that Continue the Legacy of Ulysses
It frustrates me to see that a work of art as radical as Ulysses has been rendered so tame by time that even Mayor Nutter — and what a Joycean name that is! — participates in the annual Bloomsday celebration at the Rosenbach Museum here in Philadelphia. What was once transgressive is now pedestrian. Yes it’s wonderful that so many people across the globe get together to celebrate a book of all things, yes, yet I can’t help wondering why we insist on living in the past.
‘The Country of Ice Cream Star,’ by Sandra Newman
Go ahead and add Sandra Newman’s supersize third novel, “The Country of Ice Cream Star,” to the growing list of books set in a catastrophic near future. Our current fascination with postindustrial wastelands makes perfect sense, of course, given the daily dire warnings about our planet’s fate. At least our literature appears to be responding to climate change even if our energy policy isn’t. “The Country of Ice Cream Star” is in many ways a classic story, craftily retold and made contemporary.
Review: Dimitry Elias Leger’s ‘God Loves Haiti’
In January 2010, a massive earthquake hit Haiti about16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, and the immediate carnage killed thousands of people and leveled buildings for miles. In the days that followed, dozens of aftershocks claimed more lives. Accurate accounts of the death toll remain hard to come by, but estimates range from 100,000 to more than 300,000. Even now, the scale of the tragedy is difficult to contemplate, much less to comprehend.
'How To Be Both: Two delightful books in one
How to Be Both By Ali Smith Reviewed by Andrew Ervin The order in which you read How to Be Both is entirely up to you. That's of course true of all books. You're always free to read the final chapter first if you're so inclined. But in this instance, the Scottish-born Ali Smith has something special in store. The order in which you readis entirely up to you. That's of course true of all books. You're always free to read the final chapter first if you're so inclined.
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