Posts by author
Michelle Dean
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What Is There To Say?
A lot of people are good at quick reactions to the kind of day we had yesterday. I’m not. I mean, of course, I had the usual thoughts. Ban the guns. The door opening, and the kids looking up. Oh,…
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When Publishers Had A Sense of Humor
There was once a time when we thought of the book industry as less under siege. In that time, people were more prone to pulling the legs of the powers that be. Including the bestseller lists. In the mid-1950s, a…
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“Don’t Do It For Money”?
This week an article about the 1962-63 newspaper strike was everywhere. The Vanity Fair piece is very good, pointing out that the strike opened up career possibilities for many of the New Journalists—Gay Talese, Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and Calvin…
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Used Books
1. The people who fret over the Future of the Book talk about the loss of the tactile, of the physical act of holding the book. Me, the only thing I worry about is no longer having used books.
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Speaking of the World We Live In
People in Gaza are dying in it, and an invasion may happen by the end of the weekend. I try never to write about things I would be talking out of my ass about, and Israel/Palestinian relations happens to be…
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Go Out And Buy Kate Boo’s Book Immediately
The other night, when Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers won the National Book Award for nonfiction, a couple of friends emailed and tweeted at me immediately, because I’d been bugging them to read it for months. I have had…
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Today I have a cold, so I am eating comfort foods and reading Nora Ephron’s early collections, which Vintage has just reissued and I now command you to buy. When she died everyone remembered her as a screenwriter and a longtime…
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“But it’s John Updike in particular that a lot of them seem to hate.”
Upon Philip Roth’s sorta-kinda retirement announcement (my sense is that nothing’s final until everyone is dead) we have been treated to encomia online, and renewed calls that he be given a Nobel. I can’t help but notice that most of…
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The Man Behind the Faulkner Estate
Now here’s a nightmare most writers never contemplate: imagine that it’s years after you have died, and joined the pantheon of literary greats in absentia, and are so renowned that filmmakers can quote you in passing, and attribute it to…
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The Frankenstorm and H.P. Lovecraft
I’d suppose we all need no greater horror story this weekend than the prospect of a Mitt Romney presidency, or of the emergence of yet another Republican who has bizarre and frankly idiosyncratic views on rape. Then there is the…
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On the Comfort of Bad Books
At last weekend’s New Yorker festival, Salman Rushdie ventured the opinion that the inexplicably popular 50 Shades of Grey “made Twilight look like War and Peace.” I don’t like Twilight, I’ve never read 50 Shades of Grey, and still some defensive antenna of mine shot up. Not to pick on Rushdie…
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Nadya Labi’s New Yorker Feature
You will thank me for telling you to run to your nearest newsstand to purchase last week’s New Yorker before it disappears. It contains a remarkable reported story by Nadya Labi about an honor-roll-student turned hitman in Detroit. This is the…