Posts by author
Michael Berger
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The Fearless Book Vending Machine
“Lane’s other invention, alongside the cheap, quality paperback, was the Penguincubator, first installed outside Henderson’s (the ‘Bomb Shop’) at 66 Charing Cross Road, which signaled his intention to take the book beyond the library and the traditional bookstore, into railway…
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Books Are Greener Than E-Readers
“One e-reader requires the extraction of 33 pounds of minerals. That includes trace amounts of exotic metals like columbite-tantalite, often mined in war-torn regions of Africa. But it’s mostly sand and gravel to build landfills; they hold all the waste…
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The Long History of “Matterhorn”
“But for more than thirty years, the manuscript languished in literary purgatory, while the author struggled to find an agent—not to mention a publisher—willing to take it on. Published in April as a collaboration between the California-based small press El…
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Happy to Be Called Horror
“JC: Though the book also has elements of horror, like Stephen King, it reads very differently than a Stephen King novel. Do you consider it in the horror genre? “VLV: It’s my great hope that this book will be considered…
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In a World Without Taboos (We’d Just Be Jerking Off)
“When, they ask, are things going to get dirty again? “If you want an answer to that question, ladies and gentlemen, let me propose one. In 2010, the only sex that’s truly dangerous and unbounded is solitary.” In response to…
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The Unsettling Visions Of Thomas Disch
“Fantasy is not avoidable. The very act of writing fiction is a sin, a lie. One of Disch’s most haunting stories, ‘Getting Into Death,’ is about a writer (one who uses two pseudonyms, at least one of which Disch used…
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Phoenix Books In San Francisco Turns 25
It’s something of a major milestone to keep an independent, used bookstore running for twenty-five years. And that’s exactly what Phoenix Books in San Francisco is celebrating this month. So as an Anniversary celebration and as part of Noe Valley…
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The Hurdles Of Rejection
“When a writer tells me they give up, or when they fatalistically declare they will never be published, I begin to understand how little people know about how publishing often works. One of the reasons I started the Q & A…
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Celebrate The Anniversary Of A Wonderful Book
There is nothing quite like reading Little, Big, John Crowley’s epic and elegantly subtle fantasy novel about a New England family and their mystifying relationship with the Fairy World. In language and style and vision, in action that veers from…
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Stuck Between Two Impossible Libraries
“Every librarian, every book collector, finds him or herself between these two mythical places—the Perfect Library of God and the Infinite Library of Babel, the one transcribed by Jerome, the other by Borges.” At Lapham’s Quarterly, a beautiful meditation on…
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Judith Butler At Guernica
“All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already ‘lost’ cannot be grieved…
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Staging A Beautiful Apocalypse
Today is the birthday of one of my very favorite living writers, Samuel R. Delany. (I spoke once here before about how I share with Junot Diaz an abiding love for Delany’s work.) All it took for him to become…