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.
-
Current Reads
American Civil War Dreamscape
Tennessee born writer Madison Smartt Bell was anointed early, making one of those (silly) Granta list of young authors to watch. Despite the perils of early celebrity or recognition, Bell...
-
Poetry
A Relentless Pursuit of Beauty
If you can set aside (any) concerns about poetry in translation then you may rejoice at the publication of The Poetry of Rilke (FSG) edited by Edward Snow, a highly...
-
Current Reads
Body Parts
Will Self continues his preoccupation with anatomical titles—his last book was entitled The Butt, an early work was Cock & Bull—with Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy...
-
Rare Medium
Obama si? Obama no?
If journalism is, as conventional wisdom holds, the first draft of history, then we are fortunate to have a practitioner such as the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg involved in...
-
Back in the Day
Murder, He Wrote
Recently one of our esteemed senators (his name escapes me), in talking about our world-leading incarceration rate, offered that having so many people in jail might suggest that Americans are...
-
New Finds
Bach in the Day
Back when I was an impressionable undergraduate (as opposed to being an impressionable graybeard), I was heavily into German author Herman Hesse (Siddhartha), devouring his oeuvre and other big chunks...
-
Apropos of Nothing
Extra, Extra
Even if you don't live in San Francisco, you will no doubt find out soon enough that Dave Eggers, recently of Where The Wild Things Are fame and continuously of...
-
Serious Fun
A Modest List
This is a confusing time of year, especially in the northern climes where a number of seasonal disorders obtain. How else to explain the odd behavior where people spend money...
-
Poetry
Closer to Paradise
Octogenerian Phillip Levine, who was born in Detroit of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and worked in the mind-wrenching, body-breaking auto plants before he took up his poetic calling, has won two...
-
The Coffee Table
Mann’s Man
Photographer Sally Mann’s newest monograph Proud Flesh served as the exhibition catalogue (ending October 31) for her recent show at Gagosian Gallery (her Manhattan and Hollywood representative) and is typically...
-
Writing About Writers
Talking From the Grave
If there are non-English speaking writers who have made as big an impact on the literary world as the late departed Chilean, Roberto Bolaño, I am not aware of...
-
Current Reads
Room With a View
The possibility of Simon Mawer’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Glass Room (Other Press) running off the tracks into banality is immanent in its elements—thankfully, it stays...