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
Top 10 Books of the Year
Last week’s version of this bulletin included notice of Tony Judt’s latest opus. Sadly, this week’s news is that Judt has passed on, as some express it,...
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Current Reads
Darkness in August
More than a few people have expressed to me some inchoate feeling that, yes, August is upon us. This seems to be an expression of discomfort with the rapidity with...
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Birnbaum v.
David Mitchell Redux
Ten years after their first conversation, author David Mitchell and our man in Boston discuss 18th-century Japan, shoplifting from other novels, and Mitchell’s annual Christmas party.
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Current Reads
Jeff Bezos Sucks
Inquire of any observer within reasonable proximity of his or her wits and I doubt any would say that last week represented a hopeful moment in the life of our...
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Richard Flanagan
A conversation with Australian novelist Richard Flanagan about the erosion of book culture, Nicole Kidman’s genius, and souls that are ever underline-able.
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Current Reads
Lazy, Hazy Summer Days
Not being a statistician, I am not offering this as a fact, but my sense is that there are more short story collections being published than ever. And given the...
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Current Reads
It’s a Mad, Mad World
The notion that insanity is the only rational response to a mad and maddening world—a notion romantically articulated by exotic psychiatric adventurer and trailblazer R.D. Laing in the...
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Current Reads
Libraries of the Imagination
Having recently resumed my status, as Facebook would state it, of being “in a relationship,” and having adopted a three-month-old Labrador-Australian Cow Dog hybrid named Beny (about whom you will...
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Current Reads
A Listing Ship
Integrating the bulletins from the real world (for lack of a better phrase) with the books one chooses to read, and the movies and videos one views, is no small...
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Current Reads
Of Ice and Men
This seems to be the season for the publication of some of my favorite writers. (Actually, I think every season is.) Alan Furst’s 10th novel, Spies of the Balkans ...
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Current Reads
Summer Daze
Maybe the only thing you can depend on these days, in what was to have been our brave new world (did I miss it?), is the predictability of those benighted...
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Birnbaum v.
David Remnick
Our man in Boston goes the distance with author and New Yorker editor David Remnick in a conversation about President Obama, magazine publishing, and American Idol.