Michael Berger
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Perec On Asking For A Raise
Everyday life is surprisingly full of hair-raising adventures. Sometimes you don’t realize it until you’re in the thick of it. Waiting for the grocery store manager to confirm that you are not in fact the same guy who stole the…
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The Joys Of Freelancin’
“The great thing about freelance, of course, is the numerous freedoms it embraces, chief among them being the freedom to work in your underwear. This seems to be the one that everyone knows. I was talking on the phone to…
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Introducing Belgium’s Master Fantasist
Just like last week, Belgium, for reasons obtuse and inexplicable is on my mind. I discovered at 50 Watts a guest post by Edward Gauvin about a Belgian writer named Thomas Owen that English-only readers are not going to encounter…
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Introducing Anna Kavan
There’s an indispensable book called About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. In the first essay he cobbles together an eclectic list of authors that, ideally, the aspiring writer should read. Because Delany has read everything, you can bet his tastes…
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Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by…
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The H.D. Book: A Clarion Call for all Artists and Writers
In school I took a class on female poets and was instantly taken with the poetry of H.D., especially her later work Trilogy, a savage and mythic poem about rediscovering meaning in the ruins of war. One of the founding…
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Cendrars, The Extraordinary Daydreamer
Long before David Shields excoriated the strict boundaries between journalism and fiction, espousing, in its place, a loose and open-ended hybrid that is more in keeping with “reality”, a Swiss-born Frenchman with one arm, a Gauloises cigarette forever dangling from…
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Long Live Hobos
In Santa Cruz, I had occasion to meet some hobos. Real or fake hobos: it was hard to make the distinction in a town so enshrined to the misfit ideal. There was a train bridge near the roller-coaster that you…
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Adapting Blood Meridian?
I just found out that James Franco is set to direct the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian which is the most violent novel I’ve ever read. So I pose the obvious questions: how will he pull it off?…
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My Year In Books
As The Millions keeps rolling out their amazing Year In Reading series, I’d thought I’d offer my own attempt at doing justice to the books in my life, and not just the ones I read this year but the ones…
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Fire In My Belly
For me, having been inculcated with pictures of a bloody, naked man nailed to a tree since I was five, any discussion of obscenity, homo-eroticism or sexual violence begins with Jesus, or at least the Jesus that hangs in churches,…
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Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City
Just to let all discriminating book-buyers know: Rebecca Solnit’s new gorgeously-illustrated and highly-collaborative book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas is out now at all independent bookstores.