A South African journalist—I wish I could recall his name—once poignantly quipped “a patriot is someone who saves his country from its government.” Looking around the world (actually one need not exercise much agency, as the bad, bad news wafts through the seemingly impermeable iPod-istic barriers we
The great American novel doesn't exist--except in the minds of marketers (and those who believe New Yorkers write the best books). A conversation with Susan Straight about regional writing, as American as apple pie.
It looked as if this was a week when none of the folks I have identified as Enemies of Literature were wreaking havoc such as creating the Best Book about Whatever in the past 25 years lists or identifying “scummy little books” or beating up on Frenchmen. I was wrong.
The fetishism for full disclosure is variously amusing and vexing, especially when it comes from this, the journalistic quadrant. Of course, it’s a practice that I engage in, albeit subtly, as when for instance I announce (as I do frequently) that I am partial to books on Cuba, New
A rowdy conversation about Talese's new memoir, Lorena Bobbitt's Hollywood agent, attending fights with James Baldwin, and a hundred other reports about the joys and pains of getting a story right.
Watching the United States Millionaire’s Club latest so-called debate about the American military adventure in Iraq inevitably lead me back to Karl Kraus, who observed in April of 1917: “War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he
As a fairly private citizen I should be pleased that this week has gone by without a particularly egregious depredation occurring in the literary world—but as a journalist I am, of course, without anything to jaw about, nothing about which to form nimble sentences of despair and outrage—no
The faux short-fingered vulgarians (a little inside joke) at Coudal Partners have come up with a swell idea, not the least of which because they have shown dubious judgement in including me—they asked an assortment of writers/readers to recount (in a few hundred words) a reading experience
Writer and off-the-charts associater Lawrence Weschler talks about his new book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, plus publishing as an act of citizenship and the joy of sideways learning.
With regularity there is much caterwauling and ululating directed to the depredations and idiocies that emanate from the newspaper book review that people love to hate (guess who?)—this is engaging and amusing only to a point—one that in my estimation has long passed. Recently, it has occurred to
