Posts by author
Alex Norcia
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An Inconvenient Fiction
Invoking his new play, Buzz, Benjamin Kunkel writes in the New Yorker about how “few imaginative writers have dealt with the present-day experience of global warming in a direct and concentrated way” and why this might be the case: If…
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A Symposium on Dialogue
For The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark draws quotes from a number of writing books—among them, Stephen King’s On Writing and Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel—and creates a symposium on the art of dialogue.
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Taylor Swift’s White Noise
Nothing much more needs to be said: At the Atlantic, “the author of White Noise reviews Taylor Swift’s white noise.”
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Amazon’s Competition
At Salon, Emily Gould responds to Matt Yglesias’s Vox piece on Amazon, emphasizing his weakest point (“Amazon faces lots of competition”), while also acknowledging that his criticism of the publishing industry isn’t entirely off-base.
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The Marquis de Sade’s Executive MBA
For The Baffler, Kurt Newman analyzes Tom DeMarco’s 1997 novel, The Deadline: A Novel of Project Management, comparing the work to that of the Marquis de Sade and explaining why a seemingly irrelevant book highlights “our economic order’s sadomasochistic core.” The…
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New Yorker Cartoons That Aren’t Cats & Dogs
Coupled with anecdotes, Bob Eckstein has drawings of New York City bookstores (those that are “thriving,” or “shuttering,” or “just happy memories”) up at the New Yorker.
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Realism is a Figure of Speech
For the Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, Vikram Chandra discusses the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” highlighting what makes for good “minimalism”: It’s not about what you say. It’s about what you leave out—and the intelligent reader will…
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Can Literature Improve Your Life?
Electric Literature features a video from The School of Life that addresses some ways literature can improve your life.
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Fame and Literature, Irreconcilable Enemies
Reflecting on what might become of Roberto Bolaño, and his fame, John Yargo covers two biographies of the Chilean writer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, noting that these scholars had to “face a unique problem”: The seductive popular…
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The Birth of the Young Adult
For the New Yorker, Jon Michaud reveals how S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, a staple in middle school and high school classes, came to define the young adult genre: “The Outsiders died on the vine being sold as a drugstore paperback,”…
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I’d Rather Be Reading Airships
At The Millions, Darcey Steinke gives an elegy for her Southern hero, Barry Hannah. She recalls their first interaction—when he called her to say a New Yorker review of her first novel had made him angry—and the relationship that followed.…
