Spring brings forth a number of wonders, not the least of which are the quarterly editions of so-called small literary magazines. Since I am graced to be on the mailing lists of a number of my favorites, I am happy to note some highlights. Ploughshares (Spring 2010, Vol 36)
Such has been the influence of Chilean novelist Robert Bolaño that every posthumous publication of his ouevre has been hungrily devoured by the growing multitudes of his admirers. Now comes Antwerp, translated by Natasha Wimmer (New Directions), which was written in 1980 but first published in 2002, just before Bolaño’
As is occasionally the case, I owe (and I hope I speak for his Washington Post readers) a debt of gratitude (whatever that is) to Jonathan Yardley for apprising me of the publication of Mencken on Mencken: A New Collection of Autobiographical Writings, edited by Mencken scholar S.T. Joshi
One may view our encounters with sounds and silence as a quotidian matter, but as Patrick Madden quotes Montaigne in his collection of essays, “From the most ordinary and commonplace things, if we could put them in their proper light, can be formed the greatest miracles of nature and the
Sometimes I actually take note of how many days are like that winter holiday where people are encouraged to spend all the money they make on gifts, and then they are encouraged to shop at sales and buy the stuff they bought for other people at deep discounts. The various
Back in the closing years of the last century, Jon Lee Anderson, who currently writes lucid and useful dispatches from the world’s hotspots—current and future—for the New Yorker, hied himself and his young family to Havana and wrote what is currently the definitive biography of Ernesto Che
My sense of the fin-de-siècle years in American pop culture and the decades leading up to them is that the reactionary ‘70s were followed by an era of escalating exuberance—one barometer of that was the burgeoning importance of design and designers, in fashion, interiors, and consumer goods.
There is something odd about a quintessentially American book having been written by a Frenchman, an oddity perhaps compounded by being one of the most unread well-known titles in American history. Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume Discovery of America, published in 1835 and 1840 after the young Frenchman’
As I write this, the honorable literary organization PEN is holding its Sixth Annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, which is a thing of wonder and joy if you are proximal to the universal center of ambition (or are inclined to transport yourself there) and you are a devotee
The assassination-history business in the U.S., while not a thriving enterprise, does provide an occasional narrative from a decidedly warped point of view—though of the successful presidential assassinations, only John Willkes Booth’s and Lee Harvey Oswald’s have spurred countless treatises and analyses. In the main
