Fifteen Thousand Pages in Three Minutes
Roberto Bolaño’s überbook inspires a speed-read through literary history.
Features & Reviews
9225 posts
Lost in Space
For Mary Miller’s characters, the world is anything but big. These are women trapped in little towns and little lives, but the emotional resonance is limitless.
Save the Words
Though once upon a time Noah Webster wrote a dictionary to reflect the ever growing and changing language of American English, the Oxford English Dictionary does regularly update their logs…
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.
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…