If ever a paean to grassroots activism were needed, this would seem to be a time. As Bill Moyers expresses: Amy Goodman doesn’t practice trickle-down journalism. She goes where the silence is, she breaks the sound barrier… She believes the media should be a sanctuary for dissent, the
Fae Myanne Ng, who was last heard from in 1994 with her novel Bone—short stories in smart magazines like Harper’s excepted—sets her new story in ’60s San Francisco, offering up a story of Chinese life in America that juxtaposes old and new China. In her tale, butcher
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’s reading list; also: Notebooks 1951-1959 (Camus); Planet Shanghai; The Dark Room of Damocles; Farther Along; Exiles; City of Thieves; The Foreigner; Pure Goldwater; The Spies of Warsaw; Twilight; The Taste of Place; A History of Iran; El Greco to Velázquez; Everything They Had.
Elizabeth Strout; The Bill McKibben Reader; Kluge; I Thought I Could Fly; Nixonland; A Coney Island of the Mind; Like a Rolling Stone; Personal Days; Girls in Trucks; White Cargo; Custerology; Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House; The White King; The Outlander; Maps and Legends; Airs & Voices.
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 City I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle, responded to my query about what she is reading: I’ve been reading Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, a brilliant essay collection (most ran in prior New Yorkers) by dance critic Joan Acocella. Acocella
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: I am reading Blood Meridian (by Cormac McCarthy) for the third time and as always I am horrified, thrilled, awestruck, and repulsed by it. Also, I am reading Alec Wilkinson’s nonfiction book, Mr.
