Meet Mario Bellatin
“A few years ago the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin attended one of those literary conferences here where writers are asked to talk about their own favorites. Unwilling to make a…
Features & Reviews
9212 posts
We’ve Always Been Postmodern?
“And while postmodern books would, you’d think, have to be published after the modern period — in the 20th or 21st centuries — could postmodernism exist without “Tristram Shandy”? We…
“What does a science fiction writer know about?”
“I can’t claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The…
The Limits of Narrative
In a post on The Guardian (UK), books writer Alison Flood writes about the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books and how she would skip ahead to find out…
A Reaction Sauce
Yesterday we linked to Malcolm Gladwell‘s most recent New Yorker essay, “The Courthouse Ring,” in which Gladwell discusses Atticus Finch, Alabama Governer “Big Jim” Folsom, race, and “the limits of…
The Last Book I Loved: Inner China
Eva Sjödin’s poem-novel maps in swift, uncanny sentences the dark marvels of being little. I am a sucker for tales of sisters, especially when an older must defend a younger…
Lethem on the “Squandered Promise” of Science Fiction
“In 1973 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was awarded the Nebula, the highest honor available in the field once known as “science fiction” — a term now mostly forgotten. “Sorry, just…
“Edmund Wilson Regrets That It Is Impossible For Him To:”
Writer and famed literary critic Edmund Wilson wasn’t a fan of giving interviews, doing any kind of editorial work, reading manuscripts, and a number of other things according to a…
Take Dead Aim
Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize is ambitious and clever. By turns entertaining, fascinating, and charming, it is also monotonous with its adolescent charm and fluorescent insistence.
Gladwell on Finch
“If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law.…
Shane Jones: The Last Book I Loved, Jakob Von Gunten
When it comes to books, I believe in love at first sentence. Or maybe first paragraph, but something triggers inside me after reading an opening in a book that really…
Romantic Poets and Scientists
“A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of…