&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 from—your Labor day weekend at Wellfleet, Tahoe, or Myrtle Beach, pop in one of the eight compact
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. All well and good, but I was puzzled by an odd statement that was attributed to The New Republic editor
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 time taken from my great pleasure in reading Richard Russo’s latest opus, Bridge of Sighs—a pleasure that
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 Academy for his Nobel Prize was a wonderfully digressive incantation based on Robinson Crusoe—in which she says: Despite this
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 O’Connor, Ana Castillo, Ha Jin, and Graham Swift. And on a very sad personal note, I learned the other
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 in her latest revenue center make it hard for me to look upon that hoopla as a benign event. The
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’s an accident of the calendar. What does not seem accidental is that we seem to appreciate revolutions from a
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.
Here’s some inside baseball on big-time journalism’s favorite default mechanism to fill space or air in the event of a slow news day or a lack of imagination: a list. In this present case, I can plead that, given the high volume of books noted in the
From a Paris Review interview published in 1977, here’s Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. on patriotism: Interviewer: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Interviewer: Vonnegut: Interviewer: Vonnegut: Far more recently, I noted Rebecca Steffoff’s A Young People’s History of the United States; last week, know-it-all New York Times reviewer Walter
