Category / Reviews

by Edward Champion

New Review

In today’s Barnes and Noble Review, you can find my piece on Nancy Kress’s Steal Across the Sky. The first sentence — what some folks in the know call the lede — reads as follows:

The latest volume from the prolific, award-winning science fiction author Nancy Kress bombards the reader with big ideas aplenty — but only a genre-addled birdbrain would pigeonhole Kress as yet another concept-slinging roughneck kicking around speculative turf.

To find out just what that turf entails, read the rest of the review. Needless to say, I do think Nancy Kress deserves more credit for her work. At times, she’s almost the Carol Shields of the speculative fiction scene.

by Edward Champion

May Podcast Madness!

In today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, you can find my review of Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger. Waters appeared on The Bat Segundo Show back in 2006. And she’ll soon be making a second appearance. Which brings us to an unexpected issue of productivity that I need to address.

First off, I wish to offer a profound apology to several authors and publicists, who have been waiting patiently for several Segundo installments.

podcastmadnessI am not entirely certain how it happened, but I apparently interviewed quite a number of intriguing people over the past month or so. Many of these interviews are quite funny and interesting. One interview is extremely odd and features a notable cinematic figure making a rather naughty reference to a chorizo. Another interview ended with the guest falsely believing me to be a Republican when I stopped tape. Yet another interview features an author and a translator sitting next to each other. But one should not confuse the prolificity of these interviews for any downturn in quality.

But because there was so much interview conducting, this has resulted in an extremely ridiculous backlog of shows that I could not keep up with. And the many gigabytes of data presently lingering on my hard drive probably represents the largest backlog of shows I’ve had in the show’s history. (Indeed, I was so busy conducting these interviews that it hadn’t occurred to me to produce the shows. Between looking for work and other professional obligations, I could do either one task or the other. And not one to keep idle hands, I ended up doing a lot of the former.)

So in an effort to catch up with this mess, I have decided to not interview anybody for the next two weeks or so (although a few interviews have been scheduled after that time). Instead, for the next two weeks, this website will become a depository for May Podcast Madness! I will be putting up a new conversation during just about every weekday for the next two weeks. I suppose that this is podcasting’s answer to television sweeps week. Brace yourself.

by Edward Champion

My Services Elsewhere

Two pieces have been recently cajoled out of me. Chris Robbins recently acquired the domain, embarrassing.com, through some legerdemain that I won’t inquire about. (It seems more interesting, anyway, to keep it all a mystery.) When he told me that a number of writers had suggested that they might write pieces for him — in the same cowardly way that a casting director tells you that he will call you or an accounts payable person tells you that the check is in the mail — I felt compelled to offer him this entry for why I presently feel embarrassed.

I was also very honored to be asked to contribute to the Philly Inquirer again — courtesy of some kind lobbying from a few considerate souls who still seem to think I can write — and you can read my review of Thomas E. Ricks’s The Gamble in today’s edition. I must say that I came away from this book respecting General David Petraeus considerably more than I had in the past. It’s easy for any liberal-minded individual to get caught up in the crude sentiment that the war is wrong. It certainly is wrong. But the book challenged and informed my perceptions about Iraq in a way that I think any good thinker should consider. On this basis alone, the book is worth your time. We’re content to look at the situation with a sense of detached removal. As if it will go away. Like some obnoxious uncle with a drinking problem at a family reunion. But it’s not going away. It’s a scenario that we must understand and that we must take responsibility for. And perhaps that might involve looking hard and less superficially at the Baghdad clusterfuck.

by Edward Champion

“The Worst Book I Have Read in the Past Three Years”

In today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, you will find my review of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Let it be known that I did not arrive at my assessment lightly. I am an ardent lover of ambitious literature, and I realize when taking on any review assignment that an author has probably sweated for years on a project. As such, I do everything in my power to attempt to understand a book on its own terms.

But this novel was so atrocious that I was forced to record a video presenting just how this atrocious book left me vitiated. If you haven’t yet seen the video and you’re on the fence about Littell, I strongly urge you to see what it might do to you. For if you have any decent literary standards, you may very well find yourself incapacitated in a similar manner when you reach the end. (I still don’t know how Orthofer got to the end, but his review is also worthy of your attention.)

One other side effect of reading Littell: I was forced to spend half a day staring into space in order to recover from the book’s sheer awfulness. You can find out the specific reasons why in the review. But I must stress that, even if I didn’t possess some modest spirit of decency, I could not possibly recommend this book to my worst enemy. The Kindly Ones still rests in the stacks of spent tomes, sullying the fine offerings of other skilled voices. I have strongly considered burning it.

by Edward Champion

New Review

The book appears to have been completely ignored by American newspapers. There’s this snobbish Bookforum review which observes “lowbrow thrills” and appears written by a humorless gentleman who wouldn’t know fun even if he were offered the role of his choice in a custard pie fight. (This regrettable quality is quite typical of the people who Albert Mobilio hires these days. It has been suggested to me that Mobilio does not laugh at all or that he titters infrequently at best. To expect humor, much less fun, in Bookforum‘s dilletantish pages is akin to asking a paraplegic to wake up one morning and participate in a 10K run. It’s simply not going to happen.)

My own take on Alberto Sánchez Piñol’s new novel, Pandora in the Congo, a book that is especially wonderful, can be found in today’s Barnes and Noble Review. I must also praise translator Mara Faye Lethem (who is disgracefully unmentioned in the Bookforum review). Translators are often granted the least hosannas. But between Pandora and Javier Calvo’s Wonderful World (which I am now sneaking pecks at between other books), Lethem is one of the few translators who truly gets pulp, perspective, and idiosyncratic voice. These are vital aspects of literature that are beyond the understanding of Mobilio’s army of hubristic hucksters, but are thankfully within the easy reach of the rest of us.