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.
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Apropos of Nothing
Good News
(Photo by Robert Birnbaum) Old pal and Hunter College mentor Colum McCann , author of Dancer and Zoli won the National Book Award for fiction for his exuberant recent opus Let...
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Writing About Writers
Creative Criticism 101
J.C. Hallman, editor of an inspired anthology, The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (Tin House), has already exhibited a commendable ambidexterity with his nonfiction (soon...
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Current Reads
So Far From God
Novelist Philip Caputo (Acts of Faith, A Rumor of War) skillfully interweaves the post-9/11 reality of drug cartels and immigrant hordes with the early 20th-century world of the Mexican-U.S....
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Rare Medium
The Sorry and the Pithy
Though mayhem, war, mass murder, civil unrest, homicidal acts of God (known as natural disasters), famine, plague, and genocide seem to be growth industries, the population of brave men and...
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Writing About Writers
That Write Stuff
Now that I am more kindly disposed toward The Paris Review--the literary institution founded by George Plimpton and a cohort of his pals back in the wild and crazy 1950s--since...
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Genre Genre Genre
Boston After Dark
As long as I am banging the drum for short fiction, let me apprise you of the latest addition to the Akashic Books Noir Series: Boston Noir edited by Boston...
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Current Reads
Get Shorties
While preparing my chat with American short fiction samurai Tobias Wolff for publication, I realized that though I greatly appreciate short stories I have not been paying sufficient attention to...
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The Coffee Table
Eco Eco
In Boston the gem known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum once hosted the Eye of the Beholder, artist-in-residencies that invited diverse creators such as children's book illustrator Ashley Bryan,...
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Back in the Day
Is It Good for the Jews?
Let's face it, the Jews have long been a troublesome people for the rest of the planet. Of course, that topic or virtually anything to do with Jews is a...
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Birnbaum v.
Tobias Wolff
Our man in Boston talks to Tobias Wolff about the art of revision, how writing programs are good for training skilled readers, and why Robert Olen Butler still signs stock.
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Iconography
Robert Altman’s One Long Film
Film (theatrical and television) director Robert Altman, auteur of some 40 movies (you know what I mean, the stuff that, during what may one day be referred to as America's Golden...
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Little Magazines
Relentless Yawp
Though I grew up in Chicago reading the Sun-Times and the Daily News from a precociously early age (and thus claim a historical interest), I haven't decided yet whether the...