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Deconstructing Garfield, and Other News

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On the Shelf

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  • In 2003, as the U.S. mustered its forces for a long, messy invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein sat in solitude. He had an important task: he was putting the finishing touches on a piece of fiction. Not a novel, mind you—he’d already written three of those, and now he was just slightly too busy for another—but a novella, yes, called something like Get Out, You Damned One, and soon to arrive in English, at last: “The manuscript was reportedly carried out of Iraq by Saddam’s daughter, Raghad Saddam Hussein, in 2003. She announced plans to publish the 186-page novel in Jordan in 2005, before it was quickly banned from sale, resulting in multiple bootleg versions appearing … Hesperus has yet to announce what its English title will be. A spokesman for Hesperus described the book as ‘a mix between Game of Thrones and the UK House of Cards–style fiction,’ and said it was full of political intrigue, but that the publisher would be ‘keeping the rest secret until Christmas.’ ”
  • Like thousands before her, Elif Batuman has learned to love her fate, to heed the call of an ancient destiny: she’s moved to Brooklyn. “For a long time,” she writes, “I used to make fun of writers who lived in Brooklyn. There are a lot of things about Brooklyn that are both funny and sad, but none more so than the density of writers per square yard. I was trying to explain it once to a Russian novelist, back in the old days. We were sitting at a table. ‘There are writers everywhere. If this table was in Brooklyn, you would look under it, and there would be a writer.’ The novelist looked under the table, and said: ‘Like mushrooms.’ ”
  • Whither the stochastic, parodic Garfield spin-off? Anyone looking for an undercurrent of existential dread in America’s fattest cat can find it in any number of unauthorized novelty sites: there’s Garfield Minus Garfield, Minus Jon Plus Jon, Square Root of Minus Garfield, Garkov, and Random Garfield Generator. One artist explained the appeal: “The relative inanity of the original strip’s dialogue is a uniquely strong setup for weird/broken/scrambled non-sequitur text. I think that’s what works so well about so many Garfield variations, really; it’s such a sterile, safe, drama- and menace-free strip that injecting any kind of Dada strangeness or emotional complexity into it makes it jump off the page a bit.”