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Books, covered and uncovered
Earlier this summer, a selection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most alcohol-soaked writings was published under the title On Booze. A distillation (so to speak) of his essay collection The Crack-Up, it doesn’t feature any of his short stories or novels, though these could easily have been included also ...
James Wood is probably the best literary critic working today. If he wrote a review of the phone book, I would read it. This week, though, I find myself disagreeing with him. His recent piece in The Guardian , which offers a sort of literary critique of the “New Atheism,” is eloquent as always, but ...
Writing in The New Yorker's Book Bench this week, Macy Halford has curated a selection of "Six Shorts to Read During a Hurricane." The novels, essays, and poems excerpted include Rimbaud's "The Drunken Boat" and an amazing prose passage from Sylvia Plath, which in true Plathian style calls the New ...
Shakespeare’s had a tough year. It’s not enough that anthropologists want to shoot lasers at his skeleton to find out if he smoked weed. Now the guy who directed Independence Day has made a movie reviving the “Shakespeare authorship question,” the literary world’s equivalent of Roswell UFO theories ...
For Amazon, a publishing program is the next logical step in its long-term business strategy. For the rest of the book industry, it’s cause for a bad case of nerves. Amazon’s announcement this past week that it would be publishing its first major title—The 4-Hour Chef, by self-help maven Tim ...
I ask the above question at least halfway in earnest, and also as an excuse to write about Mad Men. (The season premiere has been delayed by contract disputes, so I have to get my fix somehow.) Mad Men is the Russian novel of TV shows. Its power derives partly from the dramatization of large ...
Philip Levine has long been a solid contender for the post of U.S. Poet Laureate, but I wonder whether the Library of Congress intended to make a statement by awarding him the honor this year. From the Arab Spring to the London riots, 2011 has brought to many minds the turmoil of the 1960s, a ...
On the rare occasions when you can get a straight answer from scientists about time travel, it’s usually a pretty gloomy one. Michio Kaku, writing for this very website, tells us that Einstein “finally concluded that time travel might be inherent in his equations,” but dismissed the notion “on ...
Is it true that deep, sustained reading is an experience only a small minority of people “naturally” enjoy? And if so, does it follow that since “some current college students will not have had [that experience]…it would be futile and painful to expect them to read as most of their teachers have ...
This winter, John Berryman will have been dead for forty years. That figure strikes me as strange; in many ways Berryman’s poetic voice still sounds like that of a fearless contemporary. Then again, his recorded voice sounds like no one who ever lived. Eccentric, tormented, suicidal, Berryman ...
Having enjoyed this recent Big Think video, in which drama critic Ben Brantley is asked to name a Shakespearean character that Obama closely resembles, I've been giving the question a little thought myself. Brantley’s answers are illuminating but, as he admits, not completely satisfying. He ...
The literary essay I’ve enjoyed most this year has been “The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels,” published by The Millions back in May. In it, Mark O’Connell argues that the Gravity’s Rainbows and Infinite Jests of the world take their readers hostage, doling out punishments and rewards so ...
Bravo to Canadian literary legend Margaret Atwood for waging online warfare against library closings this week. When Toronto councillor Doug Ford floated some made-up statistics about the number of libraries in his district, by way of suggesting that the city could afford to lose a few, Atwood ...
My post attributing the death of Borders to Amazon’s sales tax advantage raised some hackles among commenters and fellow bloggers alike. Matthew Nisbet over at Age of Engagement countered that the reasons for Borders’ downfall “go much deeper and broader than simply blaming Amazon.” Book Think ...
Earlier this summer I was feeling down in the dumps about libraries. I was spending the month of June in Flushing, Queens, a melting-pot neighborhood where the local library bustles with patrons of all ages. Unfortunately, like much of the Queens Library system, the Flushing branch had been ...