Eliot and Dostoevsky
“Eliot and Dostoevsky were nearly exact contemporaries. Born within two years of each other, they died less than two months apart, Eliot in 1880, Dostoevsky in 1881. For both of…
Posts by month
November 2011
306 posts
China’s New Form of Publishing
“Here in China, nearly 195 million people are hooked on a kind of literature that is virtually unknown in the West, but that is rapidly transforming its authors and a…
Bartleby in NYC
Some friends of Housing Works Bookstore are hosting a marathon reading of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. It’s only 45 pages, but it’s an exciting…
Literary Almost Deaths
What if J.K. Rowling had killed off Ron Weasley, or Melville had killed of Starbuck, or Fitzgerald had killed off Daisy Buchanan? The Awl explores characters who nearly died in…
Tattooed Science
Carl Zimmer’s Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed reveals the crossroads between the sciences and tattoo culture. The result is “a weird and wonderful almanac of the lovable geek…
Debutantes in Distress
Lori Baker’s new short story collection, Crash and Tell, is led by a cast of women whose rich creative minds derail their own lives.
Patti Smith’s Photographs
“Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Bolaño’s chair, Smith’s father’s favourite cup, Virginia Woolf’s cane and bed. It is as if she were furnishing a home with these photographs for the ghosts of…
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
I never realized how lacking my life was in upside down flying rhinos. If any one is wondering what to get me for Christmas this year, might I suggest one…
Why Occupy Wall Street Has Already Won: A Poet’s Report from the Trenches
The demands on Occupy Wall Street far outnumber the demands by Occupy Wall Street — because occupiers don’t demand, they exist and they triumph by using their existence to overwrite…
Love and Shame and Love Review
“Instead of a sustained narrative, hundreds of snapshots from Alexander’s past are pieced together—though ‘snapshots’ suggests something static, and each of these eye-blink vignettes is animated by yearning and often…
Occupy Wall Street Roundup
Majority of protesters are not Republicans, nor are they Democrats: “70 percent of Occupy Wall Streeters label themselves ‘independent.'” There are also more children now, and they are there to…