They’re Called Cells for a Reason
A review of Micrographia People don’t read enough, and when they do, they don’t ask the questions of themselves that Micrographia demands.
Features & Reviews
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The Last Book I Loved: The Fixer
A couple of years ago I went totally bananas over The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. The story: Yakov, a Jewish man living in Russia in the early 1900s, is falsely…
The Last Book(s) I Loved: Juliet Linderman, Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia
It’s impossible to read George Saunders books slowly. This might be cheating because I’d read them before, although not in a few years, but a couple of weeks ago I…
Alison Tyler: The Last Book I Loved, Born Standing Up
The album is from 1974, but we got our grubby little hands on a copy of a tape in the early 80s, which we played so often we had the…
The Last Book I Loved: Microcosms
The book I’m reading now, Microcosms by Claudio Magris. I’m traveling in China while falling in love with a book about the tiny and strange borderlands between Croatia (Istria) and…
Why are we dead anyhow?
A brief look at James Purdy’s career. It is customary to speak of an artist having his fingers on the pulse of a nation’s culture. Purdy, on the contrary, repeatedly…
How Books Got Their Titles
A blog about how famous books got their titles, peppered with amusing and surprisingly sexual anecdotes. John Cleland’s title Fanny Hill is dirty, but not for the reasons you might…
Benjamin Sarlin: The Last Book I Loved, I Have Fun Everywhere I Go
I don’t think I’ve had more fun with any recent read than last year’s I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking…
The Last Book I Loved: Too Big to Miss
I used to read lots of mysteries, and for some reason I stopped. Then I heard about Sue Ann Jaffarian’s mysteries from Mystery Bookstore on Twitter, and got addicted. Her…
Notes from Underground
The world will end in a matter of hours… unless Lowboy can lose his virginity.
Battle of the Books
“Best novel” awards are not often thrown into metaphorical convergence with mixed martial arts. However, as the founders of the Tournament of Books point out, “Everyone knows that, behind the…
The Rumpus Long Interview with Michael Uslan
Comics and movies with the man who has owned the film rights to Batman for thirty years.