Hari Kunzru
That summer I would ride my bike over the bridge, lock it up in front of one of the bars on Orchard Street and drift through the city on foot, recording. People and places. Sidewalk smokers, lovers’ quarrels, drug deals. I wanted to store the world and play it back just as I’d found it, without change or addition. I collected audio of thunderstorms, music coming out of cars, the subway trains rumbling underfoot; it was all reality, a quality I had lately begun to crave, as if I were deficient in some necessary vitamin or mineral. I had a 
“The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.” This is the uncompromising perspective of Ma Jian’s hallucinatory new novel, The Dark Road the bleak tone will come as no surprise to those familiar with his earlier work. The word rebel is bandied around fairly lightly in literary circles, but Ma qualifies. Unlike novelists such as Mo Yan or Su Tong, who keep on the right side of the domestic censor through inference, vagueness, and strategic silences, Ma has been in open confrontation with the Chinese establishment since well before the suppression of his first Like any large city, London is a place of subcultures, most of which don’t find a place in mainstream lives or in mainstream writing. Here are some books that describe various forgotten London undergrounds. Mind the gaps . . . The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon In this 1956 novel, Moses and “the boys,” a ragtag crew of Caribbean immigrants, live a marginal life in ’50s Notting Hill, dodging teddy boys, hooking up with white girls, and trying to make a future for themselves. Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton The author of Rope (1929) and Gaslight (1938) was once one For most readers (perhaps users would be a better word) of Chronic City, there will come a moment when they’re forced to admit that what they have in their hands is a stoner book, with all that implies, good and bad. On the most basic level, the title gives it away. Lethem’s New York is a sick city, suffering from physical disintegration and advanced dope psychosis. Everything seems connected to everything else, each wacky allusion, each comically dense situation, weaving baroque tangles of interrelation, until reader, writer, and characters all realize they’re trapped in a forest of signs and will