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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Birnbaum v.
Susanna Moore
It’s humans’ flaws that make the world go round, and novelist Susanna Moore examines them under intense magnification. She chats with our man in Boston about crime and punishment.
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Reading
Book Digest: September 24, 2007
From David Plante’s new novel, ABC: It seemed to Gerard that the trance he was in raised him above himself, so that he saw himself as if from a...
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Reading
Book Digest: September 17, 2007
Last week I made mention of the appearance of George Saunders on the Late Show With David Letterman and cited an account of that unlikely happenstance by one of Saunders...
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Reading
Book Digest: September 10, 2007
Among other things I can’t explain is the aptness of the well-worn line from A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst...
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Reading
Book Digest: August 27, 2007
&Consider the journalistic artifice where writers presume to know the habits and activities of their readers: “While you are stuck in a 22-mile backup on your way to—and back...
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Reading
Book Digest: August 20, 2007
As if there are not enough reasons to read The New Yorker, last week it was reported that James Wood (he of the “hysterical realism” coinage) was joining its staff....
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Book Digest: August 13, 2007
I had it in mind to vituperate on some irksome aspect of American book culture but then I realized that time spent venting my spleen on well-trod terrain would be...
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Book Digest: August 6, 2007
In his novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee has his protagonist give a speech when she accepts an award for her literary achievement—Coetzee’s acceptance speech to the Swedish...
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Reading
Book Digest: July 30, 2007
The coming months are filled with promise of great literary pleasure: books on the horizon include those by some of my favorite writers—Andrea Barrett, Percival Everett, Richard Russo, Joseph...
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Reading
Book Digest: July 23, 2007
A note to the feral fans of J.K. Rowling: Seeing them live in a seemingly endless video loop, and knowing there are apparently huge piles of lucre at stake...
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Reading
Book Digest: July 16, 2007
July happens to be the anniversary month of four revolutions—the American, the French, the Cuban, and the Nicaraguan. Maybe there is a theory that explains this; more likely it’...
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Birnbaum v.
Thomas Mallon
When history class turns into a blur of names and dates, historical fiction may be just what you need to put a face on things. Thomas Mallon talks with our man in Boston about the appeal of novels and the state of publishing.