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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Writing About Writers
Attention Must Be Paid
Merce Cunningham's recent death at the age of 90 reminded me that--except for the New York Times and colonial outposts of New Yorkers--the passing of nonagenarians (save Walter Cronkite) of great...
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Genre Genre Genre
Grandmaster Burke
Texas writer James Lee Burke, author of 30 or so books (his Dave Robicheaux novels no doubt being the most well-known), and winner of two Edgar Awards for best crime novel...
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Cuba
Fiasco Unfixed
My recent roundup of books on Cuba made no claims for completeness--nonetheless I think it a glaring omission not having included University of Alabama history mentor Howard Jones's vital monograph,...
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Birnbaum v.
Gil Adamson
Our man in Boston chats with author Gil Adamson about Toronto’s literary mafia, the fact-checking that plagues novelists, and the difficulty of listing 10 Canadian writers.
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Bookbag
Back in the Day
If you are paying attention to the ideas I am trying to express here (I hope they qualify as ideas, and I thank you if you are paying attention), my...
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Back Matter
Reading v. Kindling
If it were possible to embarrass corporations such as Amazon, the recent snafu over Amazon's recall (that would be the kind word for it) of Kindle versions of George Orwell's 1984...
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The Book Was Better
West Coast Work
The relationship of writers to the Hollywood dream machine has been extensively documented--the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink even gave us a spoof of poor William Faulkner's stint writing for the...
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Current Reads
American Utopia
If you have read novelist John Crowley's fiction (Endless Things and Little, Big), his new opus may come as something of a surprise--as his penchant is for what some refer...
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Current Reads
A Fictional Dickens
Tasmanian (go ahead, tell me you know where Tasmania is) novelist Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist [which he dedicated to the beleaguered and persecuted Australian Muslim...
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The Coffee Table
Delhomme du Moment
The Cultivated Life (Rizzoli), a delightful anthology written and illustrated by Jean-Philippe Delhomme, is a thin tome containing more than 100 of the ubiquitous French illustrator's works. As is the case...
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Current Reads
Sage Advice
At some point, someone will probably fabricate one of those pop-sociology books about the generation that is averse to reading instruction manuals: The Dummies' Guide to Dummies. (Who is buying...
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Current Reads
Revolving Snub
National Book Award-winning writer Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) occupies an anomalous place in the melee that passes for the American literary culture. Viewed as a prickly sort and outsider ...