Features & Reviews
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The Last Book I Loved: First Love and Other Stories
Falling in love with a book is as much about the book itself as reading it at the right time. I picked up First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev (Oxford Press) at a used bookstore in South Bend…
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2009 Woolf and the City Preview
On the heels of BEA comes the 2009 Woolf and the City conference, an event of modern proportion, which will be bringing fans of Virginia Woolf to the campus of Fordham University in New York from June 4-7. Keeping things…
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The Lightness of Sidney Wade
Her lightness is not merely pointing out the details of the world but showing us that without the glory of the everyday, the parsnip, for instance, there can be no weight lifted.
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On the Inner Voice
In preparation for a move, I’ve been cleaning out my files, and today I found an article I clipped from the June 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine and stowed away: The Inner Voice, by Denise Riley. (Subscription and registration is…
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The “Complete” Cosmicomics of Italo Calvino
Scott Esposito of The Quarterly Conversation reports that later this year, Penguin UK will publish a so-called complete Cosmicomics. The volume combines stories “which had previously been spread out across several volumes, or which were untranslated.”
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Losing Mum and Pup, A Liberal’s Guilty Pleasure
I wonder, when a humorist writes a book not intended for laughs. When, say, the very funny satirist, Christopher Buckley, writes a memoir – say, Losing Mum and Pup – about the deaths of his legendary parents in 2007 and…
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The Gotham Style
There’s a fantastic article on Life Without Buildings, Jimmy Stamp’s blog about architecture out of context, on how Gotham City came to have the look we know from the Tim Burton films (within the Batman universe, that is) and includes a…
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Journal Highlight: Monkeybicycle Issue #6
Short fiction is often spoken of in terms of genre, a genre of ephemeral writing that is erased from the mind as quickly as it was most likely written. But the fallacy in this is that genre presupposes a style…
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Punch Drunk Love
This is a story about how appearing bald on the cover of a book led to my getting punched repeatedly by middle-aged women in India. No, actually, that’s not exactly true. Some of these women were ancient.
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The Latest Talks from TED
TED, or Technology, Entertainment, Design, began as a conference in 1984 that brought together leaders in those three fields with the mission of spreading ideas. Now, the annual conference challenges presenters to give “the talk of their lives” in 18…
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An Old Review of Kafka’s Love Letters
“Freely pouring his emotions into the letters, Kafka is, by turns, passionate [‘I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough’], self-deprecating [‘my energies have always been pitifully weak’], possessive…
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Raymond Chandler on Pulp, on Writing, and on Readers
My wife’s been steadily devouring Raymond Chandler, pacing herself so she doesn’t read it all at once (there is, after all, a limited supply). The other night she started in on the story collection Trouble is My Business and read…