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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Franklin & Lucy
It’s amazing to me how this story is still tiptoed around many years later. From the publisher: “Joseph E. Persico explores F.D.R.’s romance with Lucy Rutherfurd,...
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McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern No. 27
If you are unaware of McSweeney’s I’d ask you where you have been, but I realize its big, big world with lots of stuff to distract us. Anyway,...
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We Would Have Played for Nothing
Can you imagine today’s sports stars expressing the title’s sentiments? Former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent assembles a riveting cast of stars of what may arguably called...
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No Way Home
I am almost always enchanted by exile and expatriate memoirs of Cuba—from Renaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls (made into a great film by Julian Schnabel) to Alma Guillermoprieto’...
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The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories
John Kessel (Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice) is well regarded and noted in the speculative fiction world, extolled for humor and a crafty imagination. This anthology of 15...
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Glimmertrain, Summer 2008
Many of you will no doubt recall that during the ‘60s, Oregon was a much-extolled destination for people seeking what was then (and perhaps now) considered a decent life. So...
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What Alan Gurganis’s Been Reading
Tim Russert, in case you missed the news, has died. As he was a TV journalist, it behooves the U.S. news engine to dwell on and parse every aspect...
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State of Exile
Self-exiled in the early ‘70s (in response to a military coup when her work was banned and her life threatened) Uruguayan writer Christina Peri Rossi wrote these poems during her...
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Say You’re One of Them
Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan also happens to be a Jesuit priest with an MFA from the University of Michigan. His stories have won prizes and been published in The New...
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The Finder
I have been a devotee of former Harper’s editor Colin Harrison’s (The Havana Room) writing from his first novel (of six), and he rarely disappoints. His grasp of...
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The Book of Chameleons
Portuguese novelist JoséEduardo Agualuso is introduced to English-speaking Americans with this crime story set in Angola, where Felix Ventura trades in manufacturing pasts for customers requiring a nobler lineage....
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Factory of Tears
If you can point to the globe and find Belarus, more power to you. Poet Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian cultural nationalist, well-regarded and -awarded in Europe. She now lives...