June 2010 Archives
-
Current Reads
A Listing Ship
Integrating the bulletins from the real world (for lack of a better phrase) with the books one chooses to read, and the movies and videos one views, is no small...
-
Opinions
My Country, My Train, My K-Hole
There are plenty of good reasons to ride a train cross-country, but for our correspondent and his attention index, hitting the rails has one purpose: to escape the merciless internet.
-
Lunch Poems
Slider
A new poem in which Descartes is proven wrong, and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan appears in a dream and starts thieving.
-
Interview
Lauren Mechling & Laura Moser
Young adult novelists Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser are currently publishing their new novel—a meta-vampire story called My Darklyng about the writer and fans of a series of vampire...
-
Current Reads
Of Ice and Men
This seems to be the season for the publication of some of my favorite writers. (Actually, I think every season is.) Alan Furst’s 10th novel, Spies of the Balkans ...
-
Gallery
Sawdust Mountain
Photographer Eirik Johnson documents the communities and industries, specifically timber and salmon, of the Pacific Northwest. In his most recent book, he reveals the austere, quiet beauty that persists amidst the loss and decline of northwestern landscapes and towns.
-
Notes From the Balcony
Brawl Between the Boxwoods
Marigolds wither, periwinkles rot, and a tree mysteriously dribbles cat urine. Our writer is in over her head, once more, with plants.
-
Paging Summer
The Seven-Cent Advance
For most of us, assigned summer reading is a distant memory. For the TMN writers’ children, however, it’s time to crack the books—and inform us about scary bits, cover designs, and authors’ advances.
-
The Biblioracle
The Return of the Biblioracle
The Biblioracle will be open today from noon to 2 p.m. Still recovering from an outpouring of requests during his last appearance, the Biblioracle will take the last five books you read and tell you what to read next.
-
Gallery
Retratos Pintados
From the late 19th century until the 1990s, retratos pintados (“painted portraits”) were common in rural northeastern Brazil: family portraits retouched to improve appearances.
-
To Live Like This Is to Be Happy Forever
Gone Fishing
For teenagers along the Carolina coast, time passes with a little bit of work, healthy amounts of fishing, and a lot of goofing around.
-
New York, New York
Bus Bus Riddim
Bus lines across New York are being rerouted this summer, if not cancelled—and where buses go, so goes the city.
-
Announcements
Fantasy Road Trips
If gas was free, vacation days were unlimited, and your schedule was as open as the road ahead, where would you go? This month's Of Recent Note is: Fantasy Road...
-
Current Reads
Summer Daze
Maybe the only thing you can depend on these days, in what was to have been our brave new world (did I miss it?), is the predictability of those benighted...
-
Personal Essays
Nest
Where people build homes, birds sometimes build nests—and there’s no guarantee cohabitation of the species will be idyllic.
-
Reader Letters
Plagiarisms
Dear Mr. Erard, I remember my first, too. It was my first quarter as a history graduate student, and I was grading for a class on the Dark Ages. It...
-
New York, New York
Remember the General Slocum
The morning of June 15, 1904, promised a day of fun for more than a thousand residents of the Lower East Side. In an instant, it turned deadly.
-
Gallery
Picturing Corruption
In partnership with local education officials, Transparency International Pakistan asked children across the nation to depict corruption in a drawing competition to show a “Child’s View of Corruption.”
-
Interview
Steve Almond
Steve Almond is the author of the sentence, “I was a twelve-year-old whose hobbies were shoplifting and pyromania.” He writes beautiful fiction, and if you don’t know it you...
-
Birnbaum v.
David Remnick
Our man in Boston goes the distance with author and New Yorker editor David Remnick in a conversation about President Obama, magazine publishing, and American Idol.
-
The Golem Blog
On Protection
“From the day Samuel Halevi pointed at the little boy lecturing to a passel of scholars and said, ‘He carries a bright flame. No one must put it out,’ I was a protector.” The Golem falls into an old role.
-
Personal Essays
Cheater Cheater
Everyone remembers their first, especially English professors. A professor confronts a student he busted for cheating—and who caused him to completely rethink plagiarism.
-
Gallery
Foreclosed
Using a Renaissance practice of wood inlay known as marquetry, Alison Elizabeth Taylor reproduces scenes of foreclosure in Las Vegas.
-
Spoofs & Satire
I Blew the Call
Whether ruining a perfect game or mistaking your mother-in-law for a man, you can’t be expected to get every call right.
-
New Finds
Enemy of the Good
Tom Rachman’s debut novel The Imperfectionist (Dial Press) obviously makes use of his newspaper experience working at the Associated Press as a reporter in Sri Lanka and India, and...
-
Personal Essays
Justice With a Tagline
When your publisher won’t pay you for translating a popular German guide to anal sex, don’t take the law into your own hands—take ‘em to court. But which one?
-
The Book Was Better
Kick-Ass Wit
I’ve been meaning to mention this since I noted the recent monograph on the inimitable Molly Ivins, that there is a one-woman play entitled Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass...
-
New Finds
Never Mind
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead) is, of course, a gifted novelist and a highly-regarded mentor at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. She is no stranger to nonfiction, having published...
-
Writing About Writers
Reality Diet
David Shields’s Reality Hunger, which claims to be a manifesto of sorts, is an interesting read—around 600 epigrams illustrating something or other about the demise of fiction. Actually, I...
-
Apropos of Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing
As you already are aware, due to my diligent investigations and conscientious opening of my emails, Melville House Publishing created the first ever Moby Awards for (the biggest thing to...
-
Confab
Birds Without Wings Redux
As I have pointed out somewhere else, the intellectual dustup surrounding the varied reception of Muslim thinkers Tariq Ramadan and Hirsi Ali, mentioned in Paul Berman’s The Flight of...
-
Writing About Writers
Creation and Subversion
To that small but mighty cadre of the readers concerned with literature in translation, the republication of Suzanne Jill Levine’s seminal The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Dalkey...
-
New York, New York
Losing Paradise
For centuries, New Yorkers have looked for relief to the trees of Governors Island—nearby, but a forbidden world away. A new plan to make it more accessible won’t make them feel any better.
-
Spoofs & Satire
The Silent Epidemic
The first diagnosis can shatter your life—until the condition that follows glues it back together.
-
Current Reads
Where the Troubles Began
I must confess I hardly know where to begin in talking about what is destined to be seen as Anthony Julius’s magnum opus: Trials of the Diaspora: A History...
-
Interview
Mary HK Choi
Mary HK Choi, former editor-in-chief of the sadly defunct Missbehave, is now a contributing writer at The Awl and Complex. Also, it’s been recently announced that she will be...
-
Letters From New Orleans
Invasion of the Bayou Snatchers
Not all oil-soaked animals in Louisiana deserve saving. Our writer attends fashion shows, braises venison, and heads into the bayou to understand the varmint of New Orleans: nutria.