Last week I made reference to Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska—and once pointed out that her small volume Nonrequired Reading is my inspiration for this column. In that book, she notes the disparity between what was reviewed in many literary journals and what was happening in bookstores: “Most, if not
From Wislawa Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel Lecture: The world—whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we
From Red Rover by Deidre McNamer: The Paris Review Interviews, Part II edited by Philip Gourevitch Apparently, wiser or at least more modest heads have prevailed at the Paris Review and the hyperbolic claim of their interviews being the “DNA of literature” seems to have been dropped. This second volume
The silly season has begun—awards nominations being announced and no doubt the attendant contretemps to follow. I’ll refrain from my usual jaundiced opinionating except to relay the good news that Jim Shepard has been nominated for a National Book Award for fiction. He is a writer for whom
I have never thought myself better or smarter because of my love of reading—though I do tend to think that about others who read. But I am beginning to wonder what cultural litmus test we may need to gauge the intellectual acuity of our civilization. Watching the baseball postseason
I was completing David Plante’s riveting novel, ABC, in which the protagonist has what I would call a transcendental episode with a 1923 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, when I received a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Which got me to thinking about the universe unto themselves
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.
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 higher level, leaning closer and closer to read the book as the room became dim; saw himself and saw the
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’s former students, Jeff Parker. Well, George’s editor at Riverhead, Sean McDonald, was kind enough to send us the
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 of times.” Lots of good books to read, and yet there is something foreboding about the American political landscape—
