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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The Ghost in Love
If I had not spoken with expatriate (he lives in Vienna) American writer Jonathan Carroll a few years back, I might be surprised that his online biography is bilingual (English-Polish);...
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Demons in the Spring
A handsome volume by Columbia College (Chicago) mentor and Nelson Algren-award-winning writer Joe Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned), Demons in the Spring (Akashic Books) anthologizes 20 pieces of short fiction, some...
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Lincoln Logorrhea
Even before the grand finale of the 2008 election campaign, new books on the only other president elected from the great state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, were much in evidence in...
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Poetry As Insurgent Art
Poetry As Insurgent Art (New Directions), a slender (90 pages), pocket-sized, clothbound volume with the title embossed on the black coverboard is a work in progress (the earliest version transcribed from...
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The Chicagoan
As an expatriate Chicagoan living in benighted eastern Massachusetts, I can attest to the geographical affliction prevalent in these and other parts of the East Coast that are apparently blind...
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Voices in Chicago
I was searching for video of one of my last visits to Chicago’s Grant Park; that trip took place in August 1968, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy walked across the street...
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“Have You Seen…?”
Though he is the author of more than 20 worthy tomes that range over a broad literary landscape—novels, essays, biographies, histories—eagle-eyed cinephile David Thomson is likely best known for...
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Best Thought, Worst Thought
Given the titans residing in the pantheon of aphorists—Oscar Wilde, Karl Kraus, G.K. Chesterton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce—it takes a writer of high...
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A Great Idea
The decision by the Christian Science Monitor to no longer print a hard-copy version got me to thinking about my reading habits vis-à-vis that great American news appliance, the...
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A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity
In the end, it is difficult to view perennial Countdown “Worst Person in the World” candidate and Fox Network blabbermouth Bill O’Reilly as anything other than a blustering clown...
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In Memoriam: Studs Terkel
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] Having grown up in Chicago I had the great good fortune to be introduced to Studs Terkel’s work early on—as well as the other...
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Fred Astaire
The venerable and imaginative Yale University Press, which publishes a cornucopia of wonderful titles each year, including many groundbreaking art tomes (or so-called “coffee-table books”), has commissioned a series of...