Posts by author
Alex Norcia
-
Late Bloomer
At the New Yorker, James Wood reviews Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, an English writer who emerged on the scene at sixty-one: The story that Lee’s book tells (or tries to tell, because much evidence has been obscured or…
-
Lydia Kiesling Is Not Done Reading
Lydia Kiesling discovered Meghan Daum after reading the writer’s profile of Lena Dunham in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. As she chronicles in Salon, she didn’t stop there.
-
The Best Standup Comedian You’ve Never Seen Perform
For the Guardian, Joshua Ferris pays tribute to his hero, Jim Shepard, who served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine when he was an MFA student. “A lot of critics dislike the professionalisation of creative writing,”…
-
Whipping Boy
In anticipation of his memoir, Whipping Boy, Allen Kurzweil shares a condensed version at the New Yorker: his forty-year search for a boy who bullied him in a Swiss boarding school.
-
The Battle Rages On
At Flavorwire, Jonathan Sturgeon continues the “literary” and “genre” war, offering a new perspective grounded in the marketplace: So what’s really going on here? Well, it isn’t the genre of prose that has literary novelists anxious. It’s the market status…
-
What’s New?
For the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks writes about why we should read new books, when there’s so many “classics…available at knockdown prices”: As a reviewer of books she would often pan, Virginia Woolf thought one of the…
-
Nothing Left To Give
Coming across a fiftieth anniversary edition copy of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Ruth Margalit examines, for the New Yorker, the meaning of this book, especially in the context of the rest of the writer’s work: … it’s difficult to…
-
Still Thinking Through All This
Though she admits to be “still thinking through all this,” Roxane Gay offers her thoughts on the Lena Dunham controversy on her Tumblr.
-
The Characters Have Risen
At Salon, Lydia Kiesling compares the (brief) resurrections of David Chase’s Tony Soprano and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, suggesting that the two creators might owe something to one another: I can’t help seeing the debt that Chase owes to Ford—and…
-
Washington Irving’s Shy Spirit
Staying the night in Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s “Tarrytown retreat,” Salon’s Elizabeth Bradley wonders why the “stories endure, [but] why they leave their author behind.” That is, why has “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” seeped into the American consciousness, but the…
-
What’s A Book?
At The Boston Globe, Alex Beam explains the distinction between a real book and a “book.”
-
A Crisis of Peace
At The New Republic, Elliot Ackerman discusses Elizabeth’s Samet’s new book, No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America, “an expertly rendered meditation on a decade of war through the lens of the literature she teaches.”