Archive: Books
Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities is the best kind of young adult novel: one that can't be immediately identified as one. It respects the maturity of its younger audiences, while catering equally as well to older readers. It's disturbing, uncompromising, and brutal, while still showing a strong compassion for the characters mired in its war-torn future, in a North America transformed by rising sea levels. In this, it outshines Bacigalupi's sometimes brilliant debut novel The Windup Girl, which wallows a bit much in its characters' suffering.
The novel opens explosively with the escape of a stray "half-man," Tool, from captivity. This "augment" soldier (his genes a tangle of human and animal DNA that makes him immensely strong, intelligent, and resilient) leaves a swathe of destruction behind him as he runs from his captor Colonel Stern's forces (the United Patriot Front, one of the factions fighting for control of the "Drowned Cities" beyond the preserved "Orleans" cities). When Tool and the troops pursuing him brush up against the village of Banyan, two of its inhabitants, Mahlia and Mouse, get caught up in the war they've survived by avoiding for so long. Continue Reading »
Tags: Apocaly, Francis Ford Coppola, Little Brown Books for Young Readers, Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities, The Windup Girl
No Comments »
by Ryan Meehan on May 7th, 2012 at 5:56 pm in Books
In 2002, the French photographer Édouard Levé travelled to the United States to collect material for his photography series Amérique. Limiting his project in chance-procedural fashion, Levé gathered images from American towns and cities that shared their names with other places around the world. For instance, Amérique features photographs taken in Paris, Texas, and Berlin, Pennsylvania, and so on. Levé's subjects are highways and buildings, people standing outside their homes or inside places of business, and the occasional spot of roadkill—in short, scenes from the classic American roadtrip as seen through the lens of a hypnotized Continental existentialist. Amérique maps the constellation of beauty, dilapidation, and chaos to be found in the national backroads. Its rich Kodachrome color and casual preparation uncover a raw mixture of humor and melancholy that's rare among Levé's body of chilly and often hermetic work. The subjects in Amérique are never candid, nor do they exactly pose. They look as though Levé encouraged them to stand however they wanted, and that somehow by trying to look the most themselves, Levé was able to capture something true both about his subjects and the nature of their representation. The effect is somewhere between August Sander and Harmony Korine.
What makes Amérique more interesting still is Levé's development from a conceptual to an almost classical aesthetic. Levé's real dynamism is partially concealed in his mannered, somewhat gimmicky early collections, like Rugby (models in civilian clothing posed in positions from rugby photos) or Pornographie (the same, this time from pornographic photos). The organic approach to Amérique comes almost as a shock; compositionally, these photos are as subtle as they are radical. Levé's distinction between landscape and portraiture is willfully ambiguous, almost naïve: the muted smile of a Stockholm mechanic is as much its own landscape as the desolate Amsterdam roadside is a kind of inscrutable face. The syntax of the artistic photograph has come slightly unglued here; the open road seems to have hypnotized the camera-eye. Which Paris was that again? Continue Reading »
Tags: August Sander, Autoportrait, David Foster Wallace, David Markson, Edouard Levé, Harmony Korine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pornographie, Rugby, Suicide, The Empty Plenum, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein's Mistress
No Comments »
For a novel that features dreams so prominently, N.K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon rarely stays in them. But dreams loom large over the novel's city-state of Gujaareh. Here, Gatherers—followers of the dream goddess Hananja—collect tithes of "dream humors" from sleeping citizens who are judged corrupt by the Hetawa, the Hananjan temple. In return, these citizens' souls are sent to eternal bliss in Ina-Karekh, the afterlife and "land of dreams," though this leaves their bodies quite dead in the waking world. Dream humors—including the potent "dreamblood"—are redistributed by the Hananjan faithful, and go toward narcomantic healing magics that keep Gujaareh relatively healthy and peaceful. They become a resource that fuels this city-state.
The opening scene elegantly introduces much of this intricate culture by diving into the thick of things. It show us Ehiru, a veteran Gatherer, botching a gathering and unexpectedly receiving a "truth-saying" (prophecy) from the tithebearer whose soul he messily delivers into the nightmare shadowlands (instead of the sunnier part of Ina-Karekh). Dreams and prophecy are a terribly annoying combo in fantasy fiction, but are delivered with speed and restraint here. The prophecy is as succinct as they come: "They're using you." Continue Reading »
Tags: Chinatown, Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin, Orbit, The Wire
No Comments »
by Tim Peters on April 25th, 2012 at 10:00 am in Books
A question for the history of the graphic novel: Will anyone ever write a cartoon equivalent of Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or For Whom the Bell Tolls? Will there ever be a cartoonist who in his or her real life does a bunch of dangerous and exciting stuff, such as work on a whaling ship, pilot a river boat, or fight in a war, and who then sublimates those experiences via the imagination into a work of fiction that's vivid and dense and spiritually substantial? More specifically, will there ever be a cartoonist who can combine with his or her comics all that you get in Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin (the audacity, the action, the energetic globetrotting) with all that you get in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth (the disappointment, the ambiguity, the baroque psychology)?
Guy Delisle's new Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City is a nonfictional graphic novel about being far away from home in an occasionally dangerous and precarious and confusing place. It's about living for a year in Israel while trying to be a husband, a father, and an itinerant cartoonist. Insofar as it's a memoir, Jerusalem is low-key and humorous, and brings to mind Ross McElwee's documentary Sherman's March. Insofar as it's a travelogue, Jerusalem is inquisitive and observant, and brings to mind another doc: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. As a whole, the book is both enjoyable and instructive; it makes you chuckle and grin, and it makes you feel like a more informed, concerned citizen of the world. Continue Reading »
Tags: Burma Chronicles, Chris Marker, Chris Ware, Craig Thompson, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Guy Delisle, Hergé, Herman Melville, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Moby Dick, Pyongyang, Ross McElwee, Sans Soleil, Shenzhen, Sherman's March, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tintin
No Comments »
It's no hyperbole to say that language defines us as a species. It allows us to communicate on a level required to develop peculiarities like art, history, science, and religion, laying the way for our unique place among animals. In The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus imagines our species becoming allergic to this ubiquitous byproduct of its civilizations. In it, language becomes so toxic in all its forms that communication itself becomes a lethal plague that only children are immune to. One might imagine the result to be a descent into feral post-apocalypse, with humans becoming more overtly animalistic, but Marcus surprises with a truly strange, original vision of a post-linguistic world.
The novel is a first-person account told from the point of view of Sam, a husband and father. We see the unfolding epidemic through his eyes, from its early phases where children like his daughter Esther become the primary vectors, to the total societal breakdown that follows. Complicating things is the fact that Sam and his wife Claire are members of a deeply secretive sect of Judaism. These "forest Jews," as they are known by detractors, keep their faith secret, worshipping around hidden "Jew holes" that transmit radio sermons from unknown sources, activated by inserting orange wires into bilious, bag-like conductive devices called "listeners." This religion turns out to be of special interest to some once the language toxicity spreads. Continue Reading »
Tags: Ben Marcus, Crash, David Cronenberg, J.G. Ballard, Michael Chabon, Stephen King, The Flame Alphabet, The Fly, The Stand
1 Comment »
The latest in Jonathan Franzen's catalogue of long books with lonesome titles, Farther Away collects the author's magazine reporting, personal histories, and book reviews from the past 13 years and arranges them in reverse chronology, creating a this-is-your-life kind of recap of how the long hours around the publication of those two great novels, The Corrections and Freedom, were killed. The answer is that the author, for the most part, worries. He worries about the state of New York. He worries, twice, that Facebook users are unlearning the desire to communicate in person. Occasionally, he worries that he worries too much, but not much, since he already covered that in his memoir.
Without the editorial restraint of his previous nonfiction collection, How to Be Alone, Farther Away suffers under the weight of all this worrying, filled as it is with so many rote pieces impassive to the author's skills as a novelist: his sensitivity to the various impressions an encounter can have on different people, his ability to flex and withhold judgment, his dialogue. Tasked with writing about things that already mean something to someone, the author becomes contrarian and full of points, dispassionately pooh-poohing defenders of his given topics, or the unimpressed, or, in one of the most awful tirades, people who say stuff to each other on cell phones. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alice Munro, David Foster Wallace, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Farther Away, Freedom, How to Be Alone, Infinite Jest, Jonathan Franzen, The Chinese Puffin, The Corrections, The New Yorker, The Ugly Mediterranean, Time
No Comments »
The Steel Seraglio flirts with the danger of Western authors appropriating Middle Eastern culture to patronizing ends—a criticism levelled at Craig Thompson's beautiful but flawed Habibi. But Mike, Linda, and Louise Carey—husband, wife, and daughter—clarify their ideas in the rich tradition of Middle Eastern folklore like butter in a pan, scorching away any nascent orientalism. What's left is universal in its appeal and precise in its humanism. In this, the novel resembles the folktales it takes after, flavored with the timelessness of fantasy—a confident One Thousand and One Nights for our present.
This timelessness proves an intelligent way to engage with the dangers of dogmatism without falling into the trap of exclusionary politics. It allows the authors to avoid overt references to present-day ideologies and religions by establishing a prehistory that precedes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as we know it. Mike Carey has said that he and his coauthors wanted to play off "real world expectations of gender relations." This is after all a story of Bessa, the "City of Women"—how it became so, and why it doesn't actually exist in this or any other time.
Bessa's transformation into the City of Women begins when moderate Sultan Bokhari Al-Bokhari is executed and replaced by fanatical zealot Hakkim Mehdad and his Ascetics, who "shunned the pleasures of the world, but hounded those who lived by them." The dead Sultan's harem of 365 exiled concubines must find a way to escape across the desert and reclaim their city from his tyrannical rule. In doing so, they create a place that is a symbol of freedom, one "ahead of [its] time" and ahead of ours too. Continue Reading »
Tags: Craig Thompson, Fables, Habibi, Linda Carey, Louise Carey, Lucifer, Mike Carey, Neil Gaiman, One Thousand and One Nights, The Sandman, The Steel Seraglio, The Unwritten, Willingham
No Comments »
by Evan Davis on March 26th, 2012 at 9:00 am in Books, Film
[James Gray will participate in a Q&A after a screening of We Own the Night tonight at the BAMcinématek, part of their "Brooklyn Close Up" series. For more information click here.]
James Gray has achieved a small measure of success in the American film industry, and yet he remains elusive. He's critically lauded, but he's not a figure centrally discussed in the context of the independent or studio-film landscapes. He works with big stars like Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and Gwyneth Paltrow, but years pass before he's able to get projects off the ground. He's a darling of the Cannes Film Festival, but is a niche flavor in the already niche world of cinephilia. He's often labeled a "classicist," but he has more in common with the post-classical mode of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. So, what the hell is James Gray, anyway?
That's the question Paris-based Hollywood Reporter critic and Gray enthusiast Jordan Mintzer attempts to answer in his new book, James Gray. Comprised of interviews with Gray and his collaborators, along with storyboards, annotated script pages, production stills, and frame grabs, Mintzer's volume is the first full-length study of Gray in any language. It is, unfortunately, only being published in France. But fear not: Synecdoche has released a bilingual edition that can be purchased on their website for a cool $65 USD.
What emerges most saliently from Mintzer's interviews is Gray's commitment to the idea of problem solution in creating his style. Gray is no proverbial Hitchcock, dreaming an ironclad vision of his films that then must be laid out to the letter. ("I don't believe in vision. I think vision is overrated," says Gray.) Instead, Gray's style remains fluid and open to the necessary conditions of the production itself. A famous example concerns Little Odessa being set in the wintertime. "…It was written for the summer, with all the laundry lines during the final shootout," Gray says. "But you have to make the movie when you get the money, so I made it then…I realized that the snow looked amazing, that it was something you couldn't really reproduce. So I decided we should go shoot outside whenever it was snowing." Anyone who's seen Little Odessa knows that the deep melancholy of its characters' struggles finds a rather apt metaphor in the falling, whipping snow that fills many gorgeous widescreen compositions. Continue Reading »
Tags: BAMcinématek, Cannes Film Festival, Charlize Theron, Eva Mendes, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Gwyneth Paltrow, Henry IV, Hollywood Reporter, Isabella Rossellini, James Caan, James Gray, Joaquin Phoenix, Jordan Mintzer, Little Odessa, Luchino Visconti, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Scorsese, Moni Moshonov, Robert De Niro, Synecdoche, The Yards, Tim Roth, Two Lovers, Vinessa Shaw, We Own the Night, William Shakespeare
No Comments »
After her father's death from Huntington's-related causes, Irina Ellison, the sometime narrator of A Partial History of Lost Causes, roots through his old things and unearths a photocopy of a letter he once wrote to the then-rising chess superstar Aleksander Bezetov, a Kasparov-like figure who becomes world champion at age 19. The meat of the letter contains a disarmingly capital-T thematic question: How do you proceed in the face of impending doom? ("Clearly," Irina decides, "he must have been thinking a lot about fate when he wrote the letter.") Bezetov, of course, never writes back, and Irina, having inherited her father's condition and faced now with the onset of her own doom, flees her stagnant New England life and makes for Russia to track down the fading chess superstar in search of the answer.
Irina isn't above admitting the lack of sense in what she calls her "last adventure," and even further explicates the novel's reading-discussion guide in her own head, comparing the decision to a move in a chess match, but the difficulty in understanding what she hopes will be the move's ultimate consequences have less to do with the suddenness of it or with the obvious-to-everyone probability that Bezetov, no matter how wizened, won't have the miracle words to make her content with her lot in life; it's simply the brevity of the setup that makes it all a little hard to read into—that she's able to track down the woman she believes to be Bezetov's former assistant in her first round of telephone calls, that money happens to not to be an issue, that the acts of leaving her five-page boyfriend and one-page mother merit nothing like a scene. It is a chess move, but despite Irina's perhaps career-appropriate tendency toward over-explaining (she's a college teacher), it's a move made in response to a network of such vaguely recalled stuff that it exceeds its tenuous context and ends up seeming almost flippant. Continue Reading »
Tags: A Partial History of Lost Causes, Jennifer DuBois, The Dial Press
No Comments »
Joe Golem and the Drowning City opens with that dreary old literary device: a portentous dream. But it grabs the reader all the same, because the dream is more a memory than a set of convenient symbols to explain the novel's thematic underpinnings. As a woman births something inhuman in an underwater chamber, watched by "crimson-robed figures" and chained to "Numidian marble," we can almost sense the prose pulling at the lizard brain, switching to the logic of cosmic horror and lurid pulps. In this literary space, dream and reality are interchangeable, because here be monsters our collective subconscious has produced over centuries of storytelling.
In the grand tradition of monster fiction and myth, symbols are woven into the reality Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden have created in Joe Golem. A grief-broken heart is literalized within the creaking, sputtering chest of a man kept alive by enchanted clockwork. The terrors of a homeless teenager come to hissing life as masked bogeymen she comes to call "gas-men." The environmental anxieties of our present age churn up in the rising waters that consume the authors' vision of Manhattan as a post-cataclysmic "drowning city." This is a world where the outlandish hopes and fears of humanity spring into existence under the stars. And it should be as familiar as plunging into a favourite couch for anyone who's read Mignola's brilliant Hellboy series or its spinoff B.P.R.D. Continue Reading »
Tags: Arthur Machen, B.P.R.D., Christopher Golden, EC Comics, H.P. Lovecraft, Hellboy, Joe Golem and the Drowning City, Joe Hill, Mike Mignola, St. Martin's Press, Weird Tales
No Comments »
by Tim Peters on March 7th, 2012 at 2:00 pm in Books
Two new comics, Matthew Forsythe's Jinchalo and Tom Gauld's Goliath, have come out from Drawn and Quarterly, both of which reinterpret ancient myths using a storytelling style that's cute and simple and not all that interesting.
Jinchalo is a homage to Korean cartooning and folklore (just which old Korean tales is never made clear). Its colors are monochromatic and its characters are mute (not unlike the early-20th-century woodblock comics by guys like Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward). The substance of Jinchalo is that a little girl named Voguchi goes on a dreamy and playful and harmless adventure.
She cooks breakfast. She walks to the market to buy groceries. She wanders through a meadow and lies down to take a nap. Along the way she interacts with a Mos Eisley-like assortment of creatures, including a big, sad-looking furry thing, a sedge hat-wearing robot, a trio of skulls that scurry away from a headless ghoul, an oversized hummingbird whose presence turns Voguchi from a short, skinny schoolgirl into a visor-wearing, large-breasted, and middle-aged woman. Continue Reading »
Tags: Drawn and Quarterly, Frans Masereel, Goliath, Hayao Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle, Jinchalo, Lynd Ward, Matthew Forsythe, Mos Eisley, My Neighbor Totoro, Robert Crumb, Spirited Away, The Book of Genesis Illustrated, Tom Gauld
No Comments »
by Tim Peters on February 24th, 2012 at 1:07 pm in Books
Paul Mason is a journalist for the BBC who wrote a blog post last February, just before Hosni Mubarak was taken out of power, called "Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere." It was meant to explain, in broad social and historical and ideological terms, why there were so many protests and uprisings going on at that moment in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. That post went viral, and now, just over a year later, Verso has published a book by Mason entitled Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.
The book is a mix of reporting and essays, the former dispatches from Egypt, Greece, the U.K., the United States, and the Philippines, the latter somewhat longer versions of the lightweight theorizing from the blog post. Mason writes, "The book makes no claim to be a 'theory of everything,' linking LulzSec to global warming and key dates in the Mayan calendar. And don't file it under 'social science': it's journalism."
It feels as if this book wanted to be a broad, intellectually rich exposition, one that doesn't hesitate to talk about highfalutin philosophers like Slavoj Žižek or Frederick Jameson; in reality, it's a series of on-the-ground vignettes from an incomplete set of all the places in which things have been "kicking off." (Mason doesn't report, for instance, from Occupy Wall Street, or from Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, or Yemen.) Continue Reading »
Tags: David Foster Wallace, Endgame, Facebook, Frederick Jameson, Guy Debord, Hosni Mubarak, Just William, LulzSec, Negative Dialectics, Paul Mason, Richmal Crompton, Samuel Beckett, Slavoj Zizek, Theodore Adorno, Twitter, Verso, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
1 Comment »
by Malcolm Forbes on February 22nd, 2012 at 3:21 pm in Books
Peter Straub's new novel, Mrs. God, isn't entirely new. It first appeared as part of a longer work, Houses Without Doors. Then its title was prosaic and uninviting. Now it's so ludicrous it beckons you in. Professor William Standish has received the rare honor of a fellowship to study at Esswood House in England, home and estate of the Seneschal family. For a period of three weeks he will have access to Esswood's famous library and the private papers of Isobel Standish, a former guest, forgotten poet, and distant relative. He believes it's time her reputation was rehabilitated, that she should now take her place among greats such as Eliot and Pound. He flies to England and checks into the house, but not before learning "there is supposed to be a secret." His curiosity is piqued and the reader waits for the drama to unfold.
And waits. Along the way, Straub seeks to authenticate Esswood as an illustrious literary bolt-hole by having real writers as past guests. Apparently D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James went on to produce their masterpieces after their stay. Straub even hints that the "remote house" in The Turn of the Screw was inspired by Esswood. We are told more about his fictional writer. Isobel Standish is "an important precursor of Modernism," "a poet of the first rank," and "in some ways the Emily Dickinson of the twentieth century." Straub should have left the eulogy at that, but instead he opts to include one of her poems. Unfortunately, it's hopeless doggerel. A. S. Byatt performed the same trick by incorporating the Victorian verse of a fictitious poet into the pages of Possession. It was a risk, but she pulled it off. The trick backfires on Straub because he isn't in Byatt's league. Namedropping real writers who write better than Straub was a mistake; attempting to realise a 20th-century Emily Dickinson was disastrous. Continue Reading »
Tags: A. S. Byatt, D. H. Lawrence, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Henry James, Houses Without Doors, M. R. James, Mrs. God, Pegasus, Peter Straub, T. S. Eliot, The Turn of the Screw
No Comments »
by Ryan Meehan on February 3rd, 2012 at 5:37 pm in Books
The Map and the Territory begins with the composition of a painting, but it's truer to say it emerges from out of the painting—or out of its description. A little more than a paragraph in, the fiction of the scene yields: "They could have been in Qatar, or Dubai; the decoration of the room was, in reality, inspired by an advertisement photograph, taken from a German luxury publication, of the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi." An investigation of the interior leads to a revelation about the exterior. It's a small turn in the sea of them that we find in Michel Houellebecq's new novel, but it's one that deserves our attention. As readers, it's the first sign of our conditioning to a world where reality is the continuity or discontinuity between texts. This particular text, a painting called Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market, depicts what it says. If the irony of the conceit isn't lost on us, the passing affinity Houellebecq himself has with Hirst's epithet isn't either: "Hirst was basically easy to capture: you could make him brutal, cynical in an 'I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash' kind of way; you could also make him a rebel artist (but rich all the same) pursuing an anguished work on death…" The painting itself suggests an analogy to its over-text, to the parallel aesthetics—classical and iconoclastic, conservative and decadent—at work in The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq's protagonist, Jed Martin, is painting the ersatz mythology of the world of art in the time of hyper-capitalism; his two contemporaries are symbolic, godlike, free as representations to take refuge in a kind of essential commercialism through the rite that the sale of this painting would renew. But the latter will never come to pass: "On closer inspection, the night itself wasn't right: it didn't have that sumptuousness, that mystery one associates with nights on the Arabian Peninsula; he should have used a deep blue, not ultramarine. He was making a truly shitty painting. He seized a palette knife, cut open Damien Hirst's eye, and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight linen fibers, and therefore very tough." This time the path from interior to exterior leads through an act of violence that renders the boundary between the two meaningless. Continue Reading »
Tags: Knopf, Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory
No Comments »
Based partially on Ramona Ausubel's own great-grandparents' experiences during WWI, No One Is Here Except All of Us concerns a village's attempts at self-preservation during WWII, focusing on one particular eventual family. The village is a tiny Romanian peninsula made up of nine families whose ancestors wandered the eastern European countryside for decades in search of shelter; Zalischik, where they finally settled, provided food (cabbage, mostly) and, more importantly, isolation from persecutors. By 1939, the isolation is such that the residents don't know Hitler and have heard nothing of his agenda, and they only learn of the surrounding air strikes when a neighboring village is hit and its sole survivor washes up on their shores.
The survivor, whom the 30 or 40 village residents refer to as "the stranger," is subsequently imbued with oracular gifts (she knew of the war, after all, so there's no telling what else she may know). She is God, of course, to them, despite her claims otherwise, and the villagers soon come to her with their troubles, the chief among them being what to do in the face of permanent disappearance. Her somewhat baffling response serves as the engine for the resulting narrative: Pretend like it's not happening. Continue Reading »
Tags: Blindness, José Saramago, No One Is Here Except All of Us, Ramona Ausubel, Riverhead Books
No Comments »
Recent Comments:
The Conversations: Michael Haneke
by Ed Howard
Links for the Day: The Yankee Comandante, Dunces Maybe Finds Its Ignatius, Michael Haneke on Amour, The Great Gatsby Trailer, & More
by shootthecritic
February House Composer Gabriel Kahane and Book Writer Seth Bockley Talk Communal Music
by David Ehrenstein
A Movie a Day, Day 83: Andrei Rublev
by murtazaali
Critical Distance: The Artist
by DRush76