The plight of a man in a world questioning masculinity is, understandably, a very hot topic. Michel Houellebecq’s tortured and lonely men continue to wonder about how communication with women is in any way possible. In what he says will be his last novel, Annihilation, one reflects: “The maintenance of any kind of sexual activity in an established couple is in itself a real…
Russell Smith
Russell Smith is the author of many books, including, most recently, Self Care.
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Russell Smith
Mavis Gallant was stunningly prolific, with 116 stories in The New Yorker alone. Of the two dozen books she published, nine are curated selections with titles like Paris Stories and Montreal Stories (there is some repetition among them). Despite persistent if haphazard attempts at cataloguing her fiction, much has escaped the…
Empire in Collapse
Finally, a global turning-of-the-tables dystopian novel that transcends clichés about Islam and the West April 2017
The rise of jihadist Islam and the turmoil of the Arab world have led to a few dystopian it-can-happen-here novels that imagine the rise of a powerful Islamist state to the detriment of democratic values. Michel Houellebecq’s Submission imagines a not-too-distant French republic in which an Islamist party is elected to the federal government (its only serious opposition is the racist nationalist…