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Books, covered and uncovered
They remember her in colloquia and symposia, they remember her in the journals. They don’t remember her in the streets, her haunts. Reading her great novel Nightwood, Jeannette Winterson has said, “is mainly the preserve of academics and students,” but not too many of them read it either. The ...
Only two authenticated images of Emily Dickinson exist: one a painting of her (and her siblings) as a child, the other an iconic photograph of her as a teenager. In the past fifty years two images have gained publicity as possible "new" photos of the poet; both have largely been discredited, though ...
Five years ago this October, J. K. Rowling outed one of the principal characters in her Harry Potter series before a delighted audience at Carnegie Hall. The final installment in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had appeared three months earlier, and Rowling was riding a high tide ...
With the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy topping bestseller lists worldwide, it is now fair to argue that the best and worst novelists in the English language share a last name. At the very least the contrast between Henry and E. L. James will provide rich material for future graduate theses: one is a ...
In 2006 the New York Times asked a select group of literary sages: “What’s the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years?” The results of the poll stirred chatter, passions, and healthy controversy. Toni Morrison’s Beloved emerged as the voters' favorite, followed by Don DeLillo’s ...
A Q&A With Dr. John L. Casti, author, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything Dr. John L. Casti is a complexity scientist. This is one of those job descriptions I would love to flaunt on business cards and over cocktails: Hostess: And what does that involve, exactly? Me: Yes, well. [Frowning ...
Dear readers, Book Think debuted one year ago this month, and I'm in the mood to commemorate. Since it's too hot for books, thinking, or even turning pages absently while staring slack-jawed into space, let's take a look back instead at the best of the blog so far. Together we've pondered the ...
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what anyone supposed ...
People are not talking enough about The Bridge of San Luis Rey. No question, it’s a well-respected novel: it won the Pulitzer in 1928 and came in at #37 on the MLA’s list of “100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century.” It was adapted, apparently, into a 2004 Robert De Niro film, and it had a brief ...
Who knew that Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine fiction writer and maestro of high literary culture, was a Martian Chronicles fan? Now that you know, doesn’t it seem fitting? In Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions I came across the following tribute to Ray Bradbury, who died this past week at 91 ...
The new Wes Anderson film arrived on the scene last month, and with it, certain comforting inevitabilities. I don’t mean the Bill Murray role or the nostalgic pop soundtrack. I mean the raftload of clichés in the reviews—even the positive ones. Anderson has been called “twee,” a word more smug than ...
In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. But a ...
I’d like to add to the recent wave of eulogies in honor of Paul Fussell, poetry and culture critic, veteran of the Second World War and author of a classic study on the First, who died this past week at age 88. Brave, ornery, and fascinating even when wrong, he argued a thesis in The Great War and ...
I’ve read nothing more heartwarming recently than the excerpts from young Obama’s love letters in the new Vanity Fair. The glow they exude has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with nostalgia. They’re so post-collegiate, they almost reek of ramen. Full of curiosity and self-absorption ...
The copyright on Mein Kampf, Hitler’s infamous 700-page anti-Semitic rant, is scheduled to expire in 2015. Fearing an onslaught of neo-Nazi editions, the Bavarian state has decided to reprint the book in Germany for the first time since World War II, in a scholarly version they hope will be viewed ...