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
Price Is Right
Considering the marginal contribution literary fiction makes to the commercial publishing engine’s so-called bottom line, I am ever astounded so many literary biographies, writers’ memoirs, and authors’ correspondences are...
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Current Reads
Impact
An April 1999 event at a Colorado high school should have changed the way Americans view childhood and child rearing. It did for me. As the parent of a young boy...
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Current Reads
Performance Anxiety
Alex Rodriguez stopped being interesting to me about the time he went from the Seattle Mariners—where he played with Junior Griffey—to Texas, where he was handed 200 million dollars...
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The New Pantheon
George Pelecanos
(Photo by Robert Birnbaum) One of the dependable touchstones of publishing is that every few years that rickety engine will cough out a book by maestro George Pelecanos (and a...
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Current Reads
Desperate Housewife
While I am not a big fan of Oprah Winfrey, I don’t hold it against any writer that Oprah (who is not a tasteless dummy) may have brought them...
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Apropos of Nothing
An Introduction
Despite something approximating my best efforts, many venues for book information continue to propagate the silly notion that there is such a thing as summer reading. This is such a...
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Current Reads
Best Western
As a young American, I was never enamored of the so-called horse operas that populated the airwaves in the ‘50s and ‘60s: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Cisco Kid, Gunsmoke,...
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Genre Genre Genre
Dirty Big Secret
English writer Philip Kerr, who has authored 19 novels (including some children’s books) and found himself on Granta’s second “Best of Young British Novelists” list in 1993 (along with Louis...
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Current Reads
The Artist Accused
Photographer Philippe Halsman snapped some of the planet’s most famous faces—Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Bob Hope, and countless others—and...
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Reading
The Renegades
I haven’t read T. Jefferson Parker’s books for a while, though when I spoke with him in the mid-’90s I was favorably impressed with his writing. Along...
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Reading
The Life You Can Save
There is much anecdotal evidence to support the view that despite America’s vast riches (yes, even now) we are still in thrall to a lifeboat mentality. On the other...
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Birnbaum v.
Joseph O’Connor
Our man in Boston talks with novelist Joseph O’Connor about writing historical fiction, the role of the Irish in the American Civil War, and the trouble of trilogies.