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Join NOW!Over at the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien discusses iconic poet and punk-rocker Patti Smith’s new memoir, M Train: What the book expresses supremely well is the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky, so sketchily perceptible, that at any moment one might go astray and never be heard […]
...moreCan dolphin sonar penetrate the steel hull of a boat—and pinpoint a stilled heart? Can dolphins empathize with human bereavement? Is dolphin society organized enough to permit the formation of a funeral cavalcade? The New York Review of Books reviews Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and explores what, if anything, separates humans […]
...moreIn a world where no romantic attachment meant you were turned into an animal, which creature would your lonely self choose? Francine Prose, author of Bullyville, Blue Angels, and many others, writes about the strange, wholly imagined parallel worlds of Yorgos Lanthimos, whose new movie The Lobster premiered at the New York Film Festival in August.
...moreThe English tend to be reserved, reticent, but Shakespeare flows like a great river, he abounds in hyperbole and metaphor—he’s the complete opposite of an English person. Or, in Goethe’s case, we have the Germans who are easily roused to fanaticism but Goethe turns out to be the very opposite—a tolerant man… It’s as if […]
...moreCreativity is an essential component of a healthy economy, and Western nations are doing a terrible job of fostering intellectual creativity. Writers, artists, and thinkers are underpaid, as developed economies have given priority to a corporate model of shareholders and profits rather than innovation. Over at the New York Review of Books, Edmund S. Phelps explains that jumpstarting the […]
...moreFew writers are as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates, and over at the New York Review of Books, she masterfully tackles the concept of inspiration throughout an impressive span of literary history, covering Plato, Dickinson, Joyce, Woolf, James. Her take? The chase for inspiration is a battle for survival. “Inspiration” is an elusive term. We […]
...moreHow do we reread and is it necessary? Tim Parks demystifies the art of going back to a text for the third, fourth and fifth time.
...more(n.); the process of forgetting; “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. When we read a book for the first time, the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of […]
...moreHow is it possible that even when I know nothing about a novelist’s life I find, on reading his or her book, that I am developing an awareness of the writer that is quite distinct from my response to the work? At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks explores why, despite the Death […]
...morePart of what’s fascinating about the Broadway adaptation, with its script and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori, is how closely it adheres to the outline and details of Bechdel’s story—yet so differs from the book that it seems to be a related but entirely original work. For the New York Review […]
...moreNicholas Lemann breaks down America’s social castes at the New York Review of Books.
...moreMore banally we may stand at the luggage collection carousel watching endless bags tumble onto the belt. We hold in our minds a shadowy idea of our own bag. Then suddenly it is there and the effort of “visualizing” ceases. Perhaps we realize that the bag is not quite as we remembered it. There are […]
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Author Maggie Nelson talks about matrophobia, “sodomitical maternity,” breaking down categories between genres of writing, and her new book, The Argonauts.
...more…it’s hard not to feel that we are in an era of massive overproduction. Just when we were already overwhelmed with paper books, often setting them aside after only a few pages in anxious search of something more satisfying, along came the Internet and the e-book so that, wonderfully, we now have access to hundreds […]
...moreThe New York Review of Books looks at what makes James Joyce’s Uylsses just as scandalous today as it was when it was first published.
...moreNick Laird takes a long look at Claudia Rankine for the New York Review of Books: When we march under one banner for different causes, when we gather many different cases under the title “Black Lives Matter,” for example, simplification is needed. Political movements require basic statements like these in order to gather disparate groups […]
...moreOver at the New York Review of Books, Luc Sante riffs on living through reggae in the late seventies: I bought the record at the time it was on the Jamaican charts, from some punk store in downtown Manhattan. I first heard it at Isaiah’s, a dance club that materialized every Thursday night in a […]
...more(n.); unification; to make into one; the unifying power of imagination; accredited to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Austen is far from superficial … Her books are intimate and compelling. She has a voice that somehow seems to chime even with a modern sensibility. She is, in essence, timeless.” –Alexander McCaul Smith, from “The Secret of […]
...moreJoyce relentlessly made things more and more difficult for readers, as if success actually prevented him from producing more of the same, so determined was he to be nobody’s servant. Hence the lucid and fluent Dubliners becomes the more difficult Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, then the far more difficult Ulysses, packed […]
...moreAt the New York Review of Books, James Gleick says that the future promised in novels like I, Robot is already here—in the form of Twitterbots.
...moreVan Vechten took to Zora Neale Hurston and especially to Langston Hughes. Biographies tell us that Hughes didn’t doubt Van Vechten’s sincerity, but he worried nevertheless how their connection would look in Harlem. Countee Cullen would eventually sit for Van Vechten, but in the 1920s, as a young black poet who believed he could write […]
...moreIn The New York Review of Books, Francine Prose analyzes “the recent controversies about the accuracy of ‘historical’ films” in Hollywood, concluding that maybe “the real source of controversy isn’t the question of truth in historical films, but rather the subjects of historical films—and how vexed those subjects are.”
...moreOver at the NYRB, Darryl Pinckney deconstructs Ava DuVernay’s Selma, starting from seat of a laymen cinema-goer, and then tying it all back to what actually happened.
...moreBoth Mark and I had noticed at poetry readings that whenever food was mentioned in a poem—and that didn’t happen very often—blissful smiles would break out on the faces of people in the audience. Thus, we reasoned, in a country where most people hate poetry and everyone is eating and snacking constantly, poems ought to […]
...moreWhile the firemen were carrying me on a wheeled office chair out of the conference room, I found myself floating over the bodies of my dead colleagues, Bernard, Tignous, Cabu, Georges, bodies that my rescuers were stepping over or around, and suddenly, my God, they were no longer laughing. We must all be able to […]
...moreFor the New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson considers the place of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, within the author’s prolific career. In addition to comparing Pym to other maritime novels, including Moby-Dick, Robinson argues that labeling Poe as a writer of “horror” overlooks the range and depth of his work. He has […]
...moreWhile Tim Parks doesn’t want to be prescriptive, he offers his own techniques as inspiration: Getting a sense of the values around which the story is organizing itself isn’t always easy; I might change my mind two or three times. But let’s say that the mere attempt to do that gives me something to look […]
...moreThe NYRB gives a profile of Elena Ferrante and her Naples novels, but the only thing more alluring than the author’s anonymity is the prose itself: There is a devastating exchange in The Story of a New Name, the second of three—soon to be four—books in Elena Ferrante’s masterful Naples novels, in which Lila, one of […]
...moreFor the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks writes about why we should read new books, when there’s so many “classics…available at knockdown prices”: As a reviewer of books she would often pan, Virginia Woolf thought one of the pleasures of reading contemporary novels was that they forced you to exercise your judgment. There […]
...moreRemember Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 Pulitzer-prize winning novel in stories Olive Kitteridge? What if Olive could come to life in a film adaptation? Man. In a perfect world, probably Frances McDormand would play Olive, right? In fact, maybe we could just give McDormand creative control of the whole project, yeah? Probably if that happened, McDormand would […]
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