1/31/2024 0 Comments Crusader no remorse marxisThink of Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer and Kunkel, whose book was reviewed on the cover of the Times Book Review by Jay McInerney and in the paper itself in the voice of Holden Caulfield, a gesture so strange it seemed it had to mean something. Indecision, his comic coming-of-age-in-late-capitalism debut, was published in 2005-a best seller optioned for the movies, and possibly the last in a series of literary-fiction debuts that doubled as genuine celebrity rollouts. Kunkel is from Colorado and had been following the Denver Broncos’ march through the playoffs quite closely, which is one reason why he’s here in New York on Super Bowl Sunday, six weeks before the publication of his second book and first in nine years, a collection of rigorous and unapologetically Marxist essays called Utopia or Bust. “Maybe everything the left does is.”įrom Rio, it was back to Buenos Aires, but only briefly. Kunkel calls it “a stunt.” But he says it lovingly, admiringly. Greenwald couldn’t feel comfortable coming to New York to see the play, which describes the death of liberal culture at the hands of reactionary forces, so they took the entire Public Theater production to him-“A show of solidarity,” Shawn says. In Rio, he met the leftist playwright Wallace Shawn and his girlfriend of 40 years, the short-story goddess Deborah Eisenberg, who were staging a one-night-only performance of Shawn’s The Designated Mourner for the benefit of Glenn Greenwald, the national-security-state crusader and Edward Snowden accomplice, who lives there. He’d been living in Argentina more on than off since the recession hit, an enviably high-minded take-the-money-and-run expat in the frothy wake of his novel Indecision, and his travel schedule was like a con man’s, always shifting. One day in late January, the novelist, n+1 editor, and now self-taught Marxist political economist Benjamin Kunkel left Buenos Aires and flew to Rio. Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos Benjamin Kunkel, photographed by Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine.
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