Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
-
Genre Genre Genre
Heads You Lose
I suppose it was inevitable that once Caleb Carr (The Alienist) wrote a so-called historical fiction using a real historical figure—in that case, Theodore Roosevelt, from when he was...
-
Rare Medium
The Big Trouble
If my recall is correct, I have only spoken to Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Blind Side) twice. It seems like more—probably because his books and his journalism (New York...
-
Poetry
Remembering the Dead
North African expatriate writer Tahar Ben Jelloun (The Blinding Absence of Light) is well-regarded in his adopted home of France (awarded a Prix Goncourt in 1987) and around the world, having...
-
Iconography
Mr. Clutch
Although I have soured on professional sports (because as we all know, money changes everything), my memories of various experiences remain vividly cherished (sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers as...
-
New Finds
Exactly, Watson!
Though I tend to have difficulty in talking with the concision this space requires about story collections—not that you need to know my problems—in some ways that mirrors...
-
Apropos of Nothing
The Story’s the Thing
I feel compelled to correct an oversight—a lapse in my steady gaze at the flora and fauna of the current literary terrain. Though some might argue that literature and...
-
New Finds
Scarface
Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel Mr. Shivers (Orbit) made its way into the scrum of books that have taken over the room where I sleep. I am not aware of...
-
Coffee Table Gallery
Movable Books
In case you are wondering, the pop-up book has been around for centuries, more often referred to as a movable book. There was a wave of popularity in the U...
-
Genre Genre Genre
Ya Gotta Have Friends
The late and lamented Boston writer George V. Higgins wrote nearly 30 books, most of them pretty good. But none was better than The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Picador), which is...
-
Back in the Day
Black Is Black
The factual platform for Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America is the appalling reality that the United States “is...
-
New Finds
Call Him Ishmael
Of our planet’s largest species I understand why the whale receives more attention than the elephant. The Megaptera Novaeangliae, after all, has Herman Melville to once and forever create...
-
Genre Genre Genre
Finlandia
Having read a number of crime stories by Scandanavian writers (Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo), I am wondering what the fuss is about, and moreover what the components...