Some Americans may find the continuing revelations of the United States’s heinous injustice and craven exploitation shocking and distasteful. I find many of them, including the massacres at Rosewood and Tula, instructive and sobering. Historian Robert Whitaker carefully presents the story of race war in Elaine, Ark., and the
It is apparent from Adam Thirwell’s (Politics) subtitle (“A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes”) that he means to have fun with this book, which is a
If you thought Edward Meese, John Ashcroft, and Alberto Gonzales were shameful, you might want to take a short stroll down memory lane in this authoritative and apparently the first complete biography of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, who landed in a federal penal institution for his part in the
I have had the pleasure of speaking with Louis Begley three or four times—pleasures additional to having read nearly all his novels. Thus it is with great anticipation that I greet the publication of his biographical essay (a form I very much favor) on Franz Kafka. Zadie Smith enthuses
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; so I wandered lonely as a cloud along some lately unvisited shelves, and happened on a book that had
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 Poetry magazine screed against Garrison Keillor’s middlebrow tastes—and more specifically his mediocre anthology of verse. One review quotes
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 amusing and well-honed unorthodoxy with this more-focused anthology. Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor, has
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 great Robert Stone—who contributes a piece of short fiction, High Wire. No doubt worth more than the price
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 precincts of Berlin allows for an ongoing rumination on a wide range of subjects. Alex Abramovich observes: Slumberland
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 library of 351 books, of which she has written five: Within these volumes lay the clues to Irma’s disappearance
