Leaving Lebanon
Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine gets the profile treatment at NYRB: Many of the funniest moments in Alameddine’s work—and he is essentially a comic writer—revolve around the difficulties of trying to…
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New York Review of Books
94 posts
One and The Same
Nosy readers often delight in sleuthing out the parallels between an author’s work and their life, as if an identifiable autobiographical source might change the meaning behind the words. So…
Zadie Smith’s Room With a Manhattan View
The mad men know that we know the Soho being referenced here: the Soho of Roy Lichtenstein and Ivan Karp, the Soho that came before Foot Locker, Sephora, Prada, frozen…
Conversation Starters
What do Fifty Shades of Grey and Tristram Shandy have in common? They’ve both started a lot of conversations. In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks tries to…
The Fifty-Year-Old Startup
In a conversation with Joe Fassler at Salon, Robert Silvers, “co-editor or editor for every issue” of the New York Review of Books, recalls how the publication came to be…
Word of the Day: Agastopia
(n.); admiration of a particular part of the body ALS constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole. First you lose the use of a digit or two; then a limb; then and…
The Theory of Trickle-Up Literacy
One does not pass from lower to higher. On the contrary one might perfectly well fall from the higher to the lower, or simply read both, as many people eat…
Letters From Ernest
For the New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson writes about the second volume of Ernest Hemingway’s letters (1923-25), published by Cambridge University Press: What makes the book revelatory is…
Hell on Earth
Former Poet Laureate Charles Simic grapples with the current global situation in the New York Review of Books. The world is going to hell in a hurry. At my age,…
When in Rome
Dig historical fiction? In the forthcoming issue of The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn revisits Augustus, the last novel written by John Williams, author of the literary cult favorite,…
Critics vs. Copies
Have you actually read Knausgaard or have you only read about Knausgaard? The sales numbers don’t seem to support the phenomenon that this Norwegian writer has become. For the New York…
Nights to Remember
I offer all of this not by way of aimless self-revelation, but as a way of provoking you to remember your stories about similar incidents in your life, stories about the…