The most recent book I have loved–a term I apply only to those few books that get a place in my personal canon–was Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing With Cuba. Guillermoprieto’s books…
A couple of years ago I went totally bananas over The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. The story: Yakov, a Jewish man living in Russia in the early 1900s, is falsely…
It’s impossible to read George Saunders books slowly. This might be cheating because I’d read them before, although not in a few years, but a couple of weeks ago I…
I saw this piece on the corner of 19th and Valencia (in San Francisco). The technique used to create it looks pretty insane. The figure is obviously cut out of…
The book I’m reading now, Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’m traveling in China while falling in love with a book about the tiny and strange borderlands between Croatia (Istria) and…
A brief look at James Purdy’s career. It is customary to speak of an artist having his fingers on the pulse of a nation’s culture. Purdy, on the contrary, repeatedly…