Posts by author
Michael Berger
-
Out Of Ugliness Comes Great Things
“I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness.” In a recent installment of…
-
Remembering Tony Judt
Tony Judt, the British historian and social critic, died last Friday at 62 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Although it left him nearly paralyzed, his brain was unimpaired, as evidenced by the series…
-
A Great American Novelist Unveiled
“This week marks the first time that a full-time, professional writer—a ‘living American writer,’ as the New York Times puts it, (published politicians, movie stars, and athletes have day jobs, after all)—has made the cover, since Stephen King appeared, along…
-
Erickson Eats Oranges, Or How To Really Like A Book
I’m a sucker for blurbs, I have to admit. But then writers blurb their friends, right? It’s just the right thing to do, so maybe it doesn’t say that much about the book. Yet I’m always looking to see what…
-
David Markson’s Library
Being a rampant bibliophile, I would love to collect the books that my favorite writers have owned and written in and embellished with marginalia. That, in itself, could prove to be a lifetime obsession, an all-consuming literary paper trail. It’s…
-
Nick Cave’s Potentially Forthcoming Films
“And before that, Russell Crowe asked Cave to write a sequel to “Gladiator,” which would have ended with “a 20-minute war sequence that ended up in Vietnam, and then in a toilet in the Pentagon, with [Crowe] as this rage-fueled…
-
New Eugenides
If you’re like me, Middlesex blew your mind. Here was a book chock-full of wildly different themes, all of them improbably interconnected: incest, genocide, Detroit, the Nation of Islam and hermaphrodites, to name but a few. It was a novel…
-
Dilettantes and Amateurs
“The Internet is a landscape of dilettantes and amateurs, those for whom this literary pursuit is not a career but an avocation. Their opinions may well be unsophisticated, but they are also largely unpretentious, honest, and conversational. They are able…
-
People Still Love Magazines
Here’s something interesting, I think. In my vagabonding around the Internet today, I came across the New York Review Of Magazines. Who knew? Who would have thought people like Victor Navasky would bankroll a project that would lavish love on…
-
On Nightmares and other Beautiful Things
The wonderful Elizabeth Bachner has a new essay at Bookslut about nightmares, bogeymen, John Waters, and a strange Serbian poet named Vasko Popa.
-
The New Female Memoir
“Unlike the tales of trauma and addiction that studded the first wave of publishing’s autobiographical boom, Crosley and her compatriots are staking out stylistically understated but historically explosive territory by describing experiences that may not be especially unusual, but are…
-
The Millions Tackles Dhalgren
I harp endlessly about my favorite things, one of which is Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, which I harped about before on the Rumpus. And now The Millions has joined the chorus, as Garth Hallberg ponders the ambiguities and joys…