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.
-
Reading
The House on Fortune Street
Amazingly, I am always catching the impressive Margot Livesey’s (Banishing Verona) novels on the run. Or as excerpts in The New Yorker. Or something like that. I mention this...
-
Reading
Senselessness
Honduran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (El asco, La diabla en el espejo), author of eight novels, five collections of short fiction, and one book of essays, and currently a teacher...
-
Reading
Worshipping Walt
Considering the novelty and power of Walt Whitman’s liberating appeal to a broad swath of society, it is not surprising that he awakened and engendered strong devotion from a...
-
Reading
Dreaming Up America
Author and filmmaker Russell Banks (The Reserve, The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction), who has 16 well-crafted novels under his belt, ventures into nonfiction with this meditation on the origins of America. Banks...
-
Reading
Gore VIdal Interview
I have found Gore Vidal variously incisive, opaque, riveting, infuriating, brilliant, prescient, amusing, and just plain entertaining. Thus, this interview was so very satisfying (as well as edifying).
-
Reading
More Than It Hurts You
New York University professor Darin Strauss’s (The Real McCoy) new novel sets aside his past interest in limning American history for a story set in contemporary America, more specifically...
-
Reading
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
David Wroblewski’s debut novel opens with mute Edgar Sawtelle living with his family in remote northern Wisconsin. The idyll is upset by Edgar’s father’s death and young...
-
Reading
The Lost Dog
Novelist Michelle de Kretser (The Hamilton Case), who lives in Australia, focuses her third novel (which won both the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and Book of the Year in...
-
Reading
The Political Mind
George Lakoff, who is involved in something called cognitive linguistics purports to explain the science behind our political decision-making and, more to the point for Lakoff, how to put that...
-
Reading
The Colfax Massacre
When I was in public school, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Rosewood, 20th-century lynchings, American concentration camps, and numerous other dark and ugly episodes in American history were ignored or glossed...
-
Reading
The Battle of the Labyrinth
My 10-year-old son Cuba has read all three prior Percy Jackson novels (The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, The Titan’s Curse) and attests to the entertainment quotient of...
-
Reading
The Enchantress of Florence
With the exception of The Jaguar Smile, a slim monograph from the ‘80s about a trip to war-torn Nicaragua, Salman Rushdie’s literary gifts have never quite appealed to me....