The Indistinct Fuzz of a General Rain
World Enough is, despite the sometimes soft dulled-razor language, an incredibly smart, idea-driven book, and the in-charge idea and/or force seems to be America, viewed both from within the country…
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Books
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All I’ve Got Left Are Unread Pages
I like looking at my books and often spend several minutes in the evening running my gaze over them. Most of them I haven’t read but the possibility that I…
No One Belongs Here More Than My Therapist’s Wife
It’s funny, I love Miranda July’s stories but Gordon Haber at Bookslut is insightful about her varied titles: “We Are Vaguely Included seems to show the influence of Miranda July,…
A Rich, Prickly Sense of Expansion
In A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Becka Mara McKay reminds us that every language is a unique translation of a combination of desire and thought, both of which have…
Anne Carson’s Luminous Fold-Out Elegy Scrap Book
Anne Carson’s new book Nox, at first sight looks like a Vollmann-esque door stopper of at least a thousand pages — until you hold the book and realize that it…
The Fearless Book Vending Machine
“Lane’s other invention, alongside the cheap, quality paperback, was the Penguincubator, first installed outside Henderson’s (the ‘Bomb Shop’) at 66 Charing Cross Road, which signaled his intention to take the…
Books Are Greener Than E-Readers
“One e-reader requires the extraction of 33 pounds of minerals. That includes trace amounts of exotic metals like columbite-tantalite, often mined in war-torn regions of Africa. But it’s mostly sand…
Disinclined to Mislead Anyone
Lantz forces us again and again to reexamine the way we see through such juxtaposition of facts as well as through the voices of characters who search for and experience…
Morning Coffee
Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon clears a few things up about Ke$ha. There are pictures here of: Salvador Dali jumping, Audrey Hepburn jumping, a dressed-up monkey jumping. The canine as…
Stuck Between Two Impossible Libraries
“Every librarian, every book collector, finds him or herself between these two mythical places—the Perfect Library of God and the Infinite Library of Babel, the one transcribed by Jerome, the…
Book Cover Missed Connections
“Such encounters are becoming increasingly difficult. With a growing number of people turning to Kindles and other electronic readers, and with the Apple iPad arriving on Saturday, it is not…
The Strange World of Shirley Jackson
“Shirley and Stanley lived with their children and 30,000 books in a rambling Victorian house near the post office in the village where Shirley had so memorably set her classic…