Read and Then Read Again
How 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.
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New York Review of Books
94 posts
Word of the Day: Oblivescence
(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…
The Living Dead Author
How 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…
Bechdel on Broadway
Part 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…
“We Don’t Smoke in Muskogee”
Nicholas Lemann breaks down America’s social castes at the New York Review of Books.
Seeing What We Read
More 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…
The Rumpus Interview with Maggie Nelson
Author Maggie Nelson talks about matrophobia, “sodomitical maternity,” breaking down categories between genres of writing, and her new book, The Argonauts.
Too Many Books
…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…
A Literary Scandal, Over 100 Years Later
The 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.
Citizens United
Nick 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…
Kinky Reggae
Over 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…
Word of the Day: Esemplasy
(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…