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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Where Three Roads Meet
This latest edition of Canongate’s Myth series has Sigmund Freud conversing with blind prophet Tiresias as he lays dying of cancer. In addition to Freud’s drugged retrospective, the...
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Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams
As the title indicates, this 500-plus-page tome is taken from the notebooks that cinema titan Fellini kept by his bedside for more than 30 years. The director of classics La Dolce...
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The World According to TomDispatch
If you have not been introduced to TomDispatch, the useful and informative web site edited by Tom Engelhardt, this anthology is a good opportunity to become acquainted. Among the many...
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The Drop Edge of Yonder
Small-press newcomer Two Dollar Radio offers up Rudolph Wurlitzer’s fifth novel, reportedly the author’s transmogrification of a screenplay of a modern-day western entitled Zebulon. The commentary on Wurlitzer’...
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The Complex
Historian Chalmers Johnson warns: Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. For example, the gimmicks the Pentagon...
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The Pornography of Power
By any standard Robert Scheer, who currently edits TruthDig.com, is a highly regarded journalist working within the admirable tradition of American muckraking. Bringing his 40 years as a journalist to...
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The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri
David Bajo’s debut novel features mathematician Philip Masryk, who, despite two marriages, has carried on a longtime love affair with book conservator Irma Arcuri. She vanishes, leaving him her...
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Slumberland
Paul Beatty’s Ferguson W. Sowell, a.k.a. DJ Darky, voyages to Berlin in pursuit of collaboration with reclusive avant – garde jazzman Charles Stone. His search in the exotic...
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Open City No. 25, Summer 2008
Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas edit this Manhattan-based literary publication, and this edition features the usual buffet of unknown (to you) writers with a few exceptions—in this case the...
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The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
If you don’t own Vidal’s National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952 – 1992, a compendium of his admirably provocative polemical prose exhibiting his vast erudition, you can dip into his...
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Sleeping It Off in Rapid City
Ten books of poetry form August Kleinzahler’s oeuvre—this edition samples from them as well as adding a few. Kleinzahler is famous (at least in poetry circles) for a...
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What Cynthia Ozick’s Been Reading
Cynthia Ozick responds to my inquiry about her recent literary encounters: Two electrician-boys were here yesterday, installing robust new wiring for an air conditioner, and keeping me from my desk;...