Chronic City
Happy day, happy day!! Jonathan Lethem, one of my personal favorites, has a new novel out! It’s called Chronic City, and is, according to Lethem, “the best thing I’ve done.”…
Features & Reviews
9301 posts
Drew Toal: The Last Book I Loved, I am Not Sidney Poitier
My only previous exposure to Percival Everett had been his book American Desert, which I had liked but not loved. So it was with middling expectations that I picked up…
Erick Lyle’s Secret History Of The City
If you live in San Francisco long enough, you start to wonder: “Where the hell can I go at 3 a.m. which isn’t home or a laundromat or a massage…
The Rumpus Review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
My boyfriend insisted I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men when we started dating. “It will help you understand the way men think!” he exclaimed. Secrets of those bearing a…
The Kakutani Two-Step
“The Kakutani Two-Step. It works roughly like this: belittle a novelist’s finest work to date – preferably by tossing around unsupported adjectives…say, “arbitrary,” “flimsy,” and “unfinished.” Then, five or six…
The Brain and the E-Book
“Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to…
Writing as a Radical Way of Living
Last Monday I had the good fortune to catch a talk given by Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s novels the Savage Detectives and 2666, at the 111 Minna Gallery…
The Facts About John Cheever
The publication of a great writer’s collected works should be a cause for celebration, and or at least a measured reassessment. How disturbing, then, that the Library of America’s two-volume…
You Caught Me
Tao Lin’s characters are constantly connected, yet physically detached. The technology they live and breathe often seems less mechanical than its users.
Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd
The popular software Pl@giarism used to detect cheating students by comparing their papers against published texts was recently used by Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare, to determine whether…
Craig Schwartz Memories
On Friday night, and in preparation for Where the Wild Things Are, I rewatched Spike Jonze’s first feature, Being John Malkovitch. What struck me was not the film’s final childlike shots or…
The Scholars and the Pornographer
Dame Helen Gardner and George Newton Bowlin Laws—it seems funny, but very good to me to see them in the same sentence. I first saw Helen Gardner, brilliant scholar, denizen…