Joining The Penny Club
“Writers love to watch their online listings. First, there’s watching the rankings that can be ginned up by a one-day spike. Then noticing, sometimes within days of being listed, used…
Posts by author
Michael Berger
253 posts
Michael Berger is a barely-published writer and book-seller living in San Francisco. He is one of the founding Corsairs of the Iron Garters Bike Club and is currently pursuing a degree in applied pataphysics. He sometimes eats oatmeal for dinner.
Dyer On Reader’s Block
“If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to…
No Government World Record
I’m only a little bit Belgian but enough to have pride when “my country” celebrates a new record: going the longest of any country without a functioning government. To honor…
Wisdom Of The Day
Comes from Gary Snyder from his influential and beautiful book of essays, The Practice Of The Wild. It’s in the opening essay, “The Etiquette Of Freedom” where he says: “Practically…
Swamps Meet Hitchcock
“So I guess I don’t feel like I seek strangeness out—I feel like we’re all surrounded by it—but there’s so much bewildering noise in our culture right now, at such…
Zadie Smith On Novel Writing
“Fiction needs intellect, but it can’t survive on intellect alone. . .It has to arrive at the other embarrassing things, things that seem too banal to talk about in like…
Paris Review Spring Issue
Paris Review announces it’s Spring Issue which will include the first part of a serialized novel by Bolaño!
On Prose, Pararadoxes and Proofs
“But even from the inside of a human life, it’s possible to see when you’ve made a baby seal out of thin air, and someone is coming along to bash…
Tandem Reading: J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene…
The Lay Of The Land
As a writer trying to write about “America,” my biggest struggle has been fully grasping the variety of spaces that is contained within America. Which is why I’ve been an…
When Criticism Becomes Disrespect
At The Book Beast, Sean Manning wonders why The New York Times Book Review “would review his memoir about his mother’s terrible illness in such a snarky and dismissive way.”
The H.D. Book: A Clarion Call for all Artists and Writers
In school I took a class on female poets and was instantly taken with the poetry of H.D., especially her later work Trilogy, a savage and mythic poem about rediscovering…