Michael Berger
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New Eugenides
If you’re like me, Middlesex blew your mind. Here was a book chock-full of wildly different themes, all of them improbably interconnected: incest, genocide, Detroit, the Nation of Islam and hermaphrodites, to name but a few. It was a novel…
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The Millions Tackles Dhalgren
I harp endlessly about my favorite things, one of which is Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, which I harped about before on the Rumpus. And now The Millions has joined the chorus, as Garth Hallberg ponders the ambiguities and joys…
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Books For The Summer Travel Itch
Now that it’s summertime, one in three people who shop at my bookstore are looking for travel guides, phrase books, travelogues or history books about some enticing destination. Yesterday a woman bought a Russian phrase book. I told her that…
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Infinite Genji
First it was Infinite Jest and now readers will be tackling the world’s oldest novel this summer, Tale Of Genji. I want someone to have a summer of The Recognitions next. Or Don Quixote or Crime And Punishment. Or maybe…
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On The City And The City
“‘No two persons ever read the same book,’ the writer and critic Edmund Wilson said. Let me expand that sentiment outward into the geography of experience: it seems increasingly clear to me that no two persons live in the same…
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Summer Rereading
“I think about forgotten gestures, the multiple signals and words of grandparents, lost little by little, not inherited, fallen one after the other from the tree of time. “Tonight I found a candle on a table, and as a game…
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A Dog Is Barking Everywhere
Foghorns show up in much of my writing, but that’s because I cultivate a disingenuously melancholy disposition that my actual life, full of hilarity and good-natured insults, completely belies. But today I discovered that “a distant barking dog” appears in…
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I Have Written The Most Important Fictional Novel On Earth
I feel bad for most writers who want to get published or make money from their writing, including myself. But I never feel that bad — after all, writing is a privilege that not everybody can do, or even should…
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Why I Studied The Humanities
“Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose)……
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Should We All Commit Facebook Suicide?
“But somewhere in that transition from a social site meant to deepen interpersonal relationships to a self promotional, commercial tool, Facebook lost its appeal. “The various facets of my life merged into a web of connectivity where I could no…
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Writing, Getting Fired and Resume-Building
“I would be lying of course if I didn’t admit I fell harder than I initially may have thought. The days and weeks following my firing were the first time I admitted to myself that instead of building a Blakeian…
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The Mythologist Of Our Time
Ray Bradbury conjures up for me images of sun-drenched Nebraska meadows, autumn landscapes beset upon by Buick-sized ravens and dusty towns overrun by sinister carnivals. He reminds me of the childhood I never quite had except in my head. He’s…