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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New Finds
Enemy of the Good
Tom Rachman’s debut novel The Imperfectionist (Dial Press) obviously makes use of his newspaper experience working at the Associated Press as a reporter in Sri Lanka and India, and...
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The Book Was Better
Kick-Ass Wit
I’ve been meaning to mention this since I noted the recent monograph on the inimitable Molly Ivins, that there is a one-woman play entitled Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass...
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New Finds
Never Mind
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead) is, of course, a gifted novelist and a highly-regarded mentor at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. She is no stranger to nonfiction, having published...
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Writing About Writers
Reality Diet
David Shields’s Reality Hunger, which claims to be a manifesto of sorts, is an interesting read—around 600 epigrams illustrating something or other about the demise of fiction. Actually, I...
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Apropos of Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing
As you already are aware, due to my diligent investigations and conscientious opening of my emails, Melville House Publishing created the first ever Moby Awards for (the biggest thing to...
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Confab
Birds Without Wings Redux
As I have pointed out somewhere else, the intellectual dustup surrounding the varied reception of Muslim thinkers Tariq Ramadan and Hirsi Ali, mentioned in Paul Berman’s The Flight of...
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Writing About Writers
Creation and Subversion
To that small but mighty cadre of the readers concerned with literature in translation, the republication of Suzanne Jill Levine’s seminal The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Dalkey...
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Current Reads
Where the Troubles Began
I must confess I hardly know where to begin in talking about what is destined to be seen as Anthony Julius’s magnum opus: Trials of the Diaspora: A History...
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Poetry
Ah, Poor Brother
Canadian-born poet, MacArthur “Genius” Award-winner, and scholar Anne Carson—of whom Susan Sontag decreed, “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she...
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Writing About Writers
Talking With Elliot Weinberger
Speaking of translation (see recent item), New Directions has an interview with poet/essayist/translator Elliot Weinberger (What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles). Of the many gems and nuggets to be...
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New Finds
Literary Boundaries?
When I received notice of Dalkey Archive Press’s Summer sale, it reminded me I just don’t do enough for those noble publishing houses like Dalkey, Archipelago, and Open...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
War Is Queer
James Lord (Mythic Giacometti), memoirist of a certain artistic set that included Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Giacometti, died recently. His fourth memoir, My Queer War (FSG), deals with his WWII...