I’m no fan of the beauty contests that are known as awards, even the literary variety; nonetheless, I accept that they normally improve the lot of the awardee/awarded. Thus I am pleased to note that Daniel Mendelsohn has received a National Book Critics Circle nod for his wonderfully
In order to reify my credentials as a bona fide journalist I feel that I must occasionally create some list or other and also exhibit some sense of timeliness and topicality—these being the only paths open to me as I have foresworn having lunch with anyone but close friends.
Cultural moments that seem to have gained weight and currency in recent years strike me as just so much noise and special effects—which does not augur well for the literary narrative, if you look at the hoopla and attendant regurgitation of the advertisements on the modern version of Bread
Last week was busy and productive wherein, prefatory to scheduled conversations with the authors, I read Naked Sleeper by Sigrid Nuñez, House of Meetings by Martin Amis, and Zoli by Colum McCann—all excellent—and then, of course, carried out the conversations which should see the light of day, um,
Who doesn’t want to be an observer? Who wouldn’t like to notice something others overlook? For a few days I’ve been trying to come up with a single bad trait associated with being an observer, but like dolphins and rainbows, observers just seem wholly good. Which is
This past holiday I bought my son—whose favorite song is Warren Zevon’s “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado”—a 1GB iPod Shuffle. Its approximately 240 songs should be sufficient for his nine-year-old musical literacy. This started me contemplating the notion of collection and storage—for the record,
One consequence of living in a largely book-demarcated reality is a useful disregard for conventions such as the reflexive (and may I suggest lemming-like) homage paid to the calendar year. Since I don’t celebrate most commercial holidays (except to give my young son, Cuba, gifts), nor do
Let me just say that I am not a fan of lists and their masquerading as service journalism—though many 21st-century post-industrial homo ludens rely on lists to navigate the shit-streams of information that threaten to capsize our tiny strange boats—which is not the same thing
If you are a book store habitué or are shopping for people who like books, you have noticed that booksellers are loaded up with books that used to be called “coffee-table books.” (Whatever is a coffee table?) My sharp-eyed editor noticed this week’s rendition of Book Digest
Last month I was in New York for a week and among the many small humiliations I endured—my husband and I were auditioning our family for preschool—was this one: I had to ask a clerk in a very famous children’s bookstore if they carried any of the
