Posts by author
Michael Berger
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The Book I Need For My Birthday
Since I’m turning thirty in early September and starting to feel a new-found urgency coupled with a blasé acceptance of life’s fast and furious pace, I wonder about the things in life I still need. Desire is one thing. I…
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Who Needs Philosophy?
Back when I was a little boy, living in a yellow stucco house in San Diego, I would sit in the hot tub at night, under desert-clear stars, listen to the coyotes howl and ask my Dad about those dead…
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A Little Bit About AK Press
For the past couple years I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Oakland-based AK Press, a small, “anarchist collective” press that publishes about twenty to thirty books a year, most of which deal with radical politics, current affairs, anarchist/leftist…
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Why Do Scandinavians Seek The Darkness?
One of the biggest selling, most highly-praised novels at my bookstore right now is The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Since it just came out in paperback, we’ve been selling like six of them a week. Based…
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Where Have All The Antiheroes Gone?
“But as I’ve been making my own antihero, I’ve come to the disheartening conclusion that he doesn’t appear to have too many contemporaries, that there is little space for the antihero in literature today. Imagine my surprise, not to mention…
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We Need Studs Terkel
At the bookstore I work at, we recently got in a HUGE shipment of remaindered books. Books by Michael Ondaatje, Virginia Woolf, Alain de Botton, all of them brand-new and at bargan-bin prices. Which begs the question, do all books,…
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William T. Vollmann Made Me A San Franciscan
One of the more anticipated summer novels of the season is also probably one of the longest, most disturbing and most intimidating: Imperial, William T. Vollman’s mammoth exploration of the U.S.-Mexican border in Imperial County, CA. Clocking in at about…
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Travel As A Political Act
Rick Steves’s recent book, Travel As A Political Act tells us how we can travel more thoughtfully. “Growing up in the U.S., I was told over and over how smart, generous, and free we were. Travel has taught me that…
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In Case You Missed. . .
Last month’s North Beach Poetry Festival, William Taylor, Jr., poet, author of Words For Songs Never Written, and gentleman, has provided a very succinct report of the festival’s events which, incidentally did not appear to include much in the way…
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Junot Diaz’s Favorite New Yorker
At Red Hill Books we keep having to order more Junot Diaz books. It’s really extraordinary. They keep flying off the shelves on a daily basis.
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Discovering Georges Simenon
Maybe because I’m one-quarter Belgian, or so my parents claim, I tend to go out of my way to discover famous Belgians. I’m half-kidding about that but I do admit there was a brief, embarrassing period when I claimed to…
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The Daily Grind Of Writing
I laughed out loud, like a lot of writers probably did this week, when I read J. Robert Lennon’s confession in the L.A. Times, The Truth About Writers. The truth, it turns out is that “writers don’t spend much time…