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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Current Reads
Ghostly Pursuits
Stories attach themselves to all manner of things, and occasionally those stories rise to some level of perpetuity. I wish I had a dramatic story for how I came to...
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Bookbag
Street Fighting Men
I actually lived through and participated in the era unimaginatively referred to as the Sixties--there was war and drugs and madness and dancing in the streets, assassinations and a presidential...
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Current Reads
Lost and Found
I first became aware of Uruguayan writer, activist, and dog lover Eduardo Galeano about 20 years ago through Lawrence Weschler's investigations of the amnesty movements in Brazil and Argentina during their...
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Bookbag
An Illustrated History
Add the names of Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer to Ed Sorel, Seymour Chwast, and David Levine, and this group of masters will give you a Mount Rushmore of American...
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Current Reads
Lyrical Odyssey
Canadian poet and occasional novelist Anne Michaels, whose first novel, Fugitive Pieces, was internationally lauded and awarded, returns some 12 years later with a sophomore effort every bit as engaging. The...
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Back Matter
Queen Jane Approximately
Accepting writing as one’s profession allows one to indulge all manner of aberrant and/or unorthodox behavior (sometimes to or with other writers). Along with the expected impecuniosities, the...
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Current Reads
South Beach, Not Hamptons
There was a time in the 1990s when turning to the New York Observer offered amusing and enlightening relief from the prevalence of so-called service journalism in the form of...
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Confab
Julia Alvarez
In the last decade of the 20th century, Vanity Fair—in what no doubt was a well-intended nod to the rising tide of Spanish-language and Latino literature—fabricated “Las Girlfriends,”...
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Bookbag
New Books About Cuba
You know a good chunk of time has passed when what was once viewed as aberrant achieves trend status and becomes simply idiosyncratic. For much of my life I have...
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Current Reads
Life Before Death
David Foster Wallace’s suicide last autumn sent shockwaves through the literary world unleashing a torrent of verbiage, opinionizing, and hand wringing—it seemed as if anyone who ever read...
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The New Pantheon
Elmore Leonard
Octogenarian writer Elmore (“Dutch”) Leonard has published more than 40 books, mostly novels, and about half of which have been made into movies—none more credibly executed then Steven Soderbergh’s...
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Genre Genre Genre
J-Noir
Crime story writer Michael Connelly’s latest offering brings back cop beat reporter Jack McEvoy from what I consider the finest of his 20 novels, The Poet, a standalone story that...