A History of the New York Times Notable Books
For Salon, Laura Miller dug through two decades’ worth of the New York Times Notable Books to see how the list has evolved over the years.
Posts by author
P.E. Garcia
356 posts
P.E. Garcia is an Editor-at-Large for the Rumpus and a contributor to HTMLGiant. They currently live in Philadelphia, where they were recently accidentally elected to be Judge of Elections. Find them on Twitter: @AvantGarcia.
Appropriating Rural Poverty
We’re living in a golden decade for rural escapist fare: the latest, most extreme iteration of a cultural construct that effectively removes people living there from society’s list of concerns.…
The Human Monster
[Julia seemed like] a monster to the whole world, an abnormality put on display for money, someone who had been taught a few artistic turns, like a trained animal. [But]…
The Companionship of Books
For Words without Borders, Can Xue describes her father’s “serious books” and how having them as companions led her to a “genuine spiritual pursuit.”
The Unsellable Books
I couldn’t sell them to Chicago for landfill. Patrick Modiano was practically unknown in America until he won the Nobel Prize, but David Godine, an independent publisher, has had boxes…
The Disaster of the American Book Awards
In essence, the American Book Awards are to the National Book Awards as New Coke is to Coca-Cola Classic, i.e., a complete fucking disaster, one that all parties involved would…
How to Write a Mouse-Washing Scene
How does one write a mouse-washing scene? There aren’t a lot of examples in literature, and in any event I didn’t want my mouse-washing scene to be contaminated by the…
The Ship that Walt Whitman Launched
In The New Republic, Leon Wieselter explains how a line from Walt Whitman inspired the publication’s logo.
A Loss of Translation
The mismatch between quality and recognition in the world of translated fiction and nonfiction is surely more extreme than in any category of literature, and while this category has a…
Ancient Pulp Fiction
A new English translation of ancient Arabian stories contains monsters, jinn, and some rather promiscuous princes. Elizabeth Lowry discusses the collection and its relationship to modern pulp fiction for the…
The Private Eye Period Piece
For a while now, such characters, if not totally extinct, have been on a steady life-support drip of nostalgia. In an age when GPS tracking, oversharing and 8 Signs Your…