The Return of Sweetness
For Dante, Heaven sweetened souls; for Bidart, who does not believe in Heaven, sweetness comes haggard, if it comes at all.
Features & Reviews
9210 posts
Stona Fitch’s Publishing Idea
Is the fix for what ails the publishing industry a new model that “definitely guarantees” writers won’t get paid? Author and founder of the Concord Free Press Stona Fitch thinks…
Winston Smith Is 39
1. Winston Smith is 39. And, rereading 1984 for perhaps the fifth time, so am I.
Remembrance of Things Fast
A review of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
The Last Book Party
So, where is the publishing industry going? No one really knows. But we like to speculate. For the March issue of Harper’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus covered the annual Frankfurt Book Fair,…
An Interview with Julie Vanderburg, Obsessive Reader
Julie Vanderburg is a painter, jewelry designer, and mother of three from Seattle, Washington, who is distinguished, among these other things, by the fact that she has been reading the…
The Bin Laden Machine
Only a few genetic lines–the Hapsburgs, the Hans, the Roosevelts, for instance–have shaped geopolitics as much as the Bin Ladens. In his NYRB review of Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens,…
We’re Elite
Publishing is failing us, and it is failing. The lamentable irony is that its foundation rests upon satisfying readers by assuming we’d like to read whatever crap is one level…
Rediscovering the West
As much as these poems tap into a mythic story of the West, they are not linear narratives, but circuitous maps of anxiety and desire, a portrait of an inner world masquerading as meditations on people and place.
J.G. Ballard’s Pre-posthumous Memoir
After eighteen novels and even more short story collections, J. G. Ballard directly approaches autobiography in his latest book Miracles of Life. (Read the London Guardian review here.) Though known…
The Unhappy Writer, Links by Mark Pritchard
A recent entry on the publishing blog Galleycat told of the writer Molly Jong-Fast and how she was quitting writing to become an agent. Jong-Fast’s somewhat privileged complaints — she…