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. I am pleased to report his newest opus is a grand story with the bonus of including Rushdie’s
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 the fourth book. Rick Riordan, whose talents lie in recasting classic myths for this new millennium, leaves his
Darin Strauss, whose third opus, More Than It Hurts You, will enter the literary fray soon, weighs in on his latest reading: The Journals of John Cheever In case you missed my notice of Alberto Manguel’sThe Library at Night,The New York Times published Manguel on the same topic.
Elizabeth Strout, whose latest opus, Olive Kitteridge, is garnering well-deserved reviews, writes: The Power and the GloryThe Power and the GloryThe Ministry of Special CasesWarm SpringsPeace The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces From an Active Life McKibben, whose The End of Nature is incanted with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
Sigrid Nunez, whose novels I have enjoyed and admired, responds to my inquiry about what she’s been reading lately: “I’ve been asked to teach a literature seminar in the Graduate Writing Program at the New School this fall. Thinking about ideas for a course, I remembered reading an
Joan Frank, whose first novel Miss Kansas CityI reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle, responded to my query about what she is reading: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two SaintsNew YorkersStonerOlive KitteridgeRecent HistoryTime and MaterialsFidelity Hispaniola: A Photographic Journey Through Island Biodiversity by Eladio Fernández As you may know, “Hispaniola” is
Having had reason to contemplate philosopher/titan Ludwig Wittgenstein, (see below) I thought I would lay out a few hors d’oeuvres of his thinking. From his so-called early phase: * The world is everything that is the case. * What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic
Susanna Moore (In the Cut and Big Girls) shares her current reading with you and me: Blood MeridianMr. ApologyStop TimeA Stopover in Venice Read on. The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic by Darby Pensey and Peter Statsny; photographs by Lisa Rinzler By now it is
As a literary journalist, I hang on to the notion that the universe of literature encompasses more than words and stories—think of the business of publishing, the cranks and attenuated characters and other odd life forms that populate it—and contains less of the refuse of life. Or at
The estimable Chip Kidd, designer of books' fronts, backs, and spines, chats with our man in Boston about what it's like to work on the words that come in between.
