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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Reading
Constructive Self-Criticism
In fits of attempting constructive self-criticism (also known as navel-gazing), I ponder the possibility that my disaffection with mainstream politics and my lifelong drift from left-leaning liberal to socialist to...
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Reading
High Wire
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] I was a reader of Robert Stone (A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, as well as assorted entries in...
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A Partisan’s Daughter
Though I dipped into Louis De Bernières’s Colombian Trilogy (The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Señor Vivo and the...
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Birnbaum v.
Elizabeth Strout
Our man in Boston sits down with author Elizabeth Strout to talk about Maine, her latest novel, and the plights of the modern writer. Now with audio excerpts.
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Live Forever
You all know, or will learn now, that I admired Kurt Vonnegut a great deal—an admiration that began and lasted past my youthful, stupid years into my golden, stupid...
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Anthology 101
Receiving an advance copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2008—guest-edited this year by George Pelecanos—reminds me that Houghton Mifflin’s onslaught of its franchise The Best American Series...
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André Kertész: On Reading
The ubiquity of digital cameras and the avalanche of images whose lives are wholly lived on hard drives, as well as other aspects of 21st-century visual aesthetics, make black-and-white photography...
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Reading
Collections of Nothing
I suppose one might be amazed at the subjects that fill the hundreds of thousands of books published each year—and though I don’t want to sound jaded, I...
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Willie & Joe: The WWII Years
Cartoonists have struggled in the American culture for their rightful seat at the big arts banquet of popular culture—the big shift in their legitimacy can probably be pegged to...
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Books That Stack Up
Last year, when word went out that Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were once again sharing the silver screen in a film based on Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, I...
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Hit and Run
Based on an impressively large body of work and awards from people who care about such things, one can say Lawrence Block is a big thing in the crime story...
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Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
A few months ago I was pleased to note James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems. Now comes a new opus and collaboration. Arguably, baseball is best consumed as...