Features & Reviews
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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 his last novel, I am Not Sidney Poitier.A day or…
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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 parlor?” This simple question might balloon into a larger, perhaps…
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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 Y chromosome would be revealed, he promised; David Foster Wallace…
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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 years later, when the novelist in question brings forth his…
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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 comprehension, depending on the medium?” David Gelernter, a professor of…
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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 in San Francisco. In the course of her opening remarks,…
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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 publication of John Cheever’s stories and novels has also been…
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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.
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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 or not Shakespeare collaborated with Thomas Kyd on The Reign…
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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 how Christopher Walken and those expensive, “absurdly heavy” monster suits…
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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 of Oxford University, later to be made a Dame on her…
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Horsley
Over at Open, the British writer Sebastian Horsley, who claims to have slept with 1,300 prostitutes, writes an article explaining his reasoning. Horsley dabbles on a plethora of topics pertaining to his love of prostitution and he implores us all…