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…
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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.
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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.
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…
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,…