New York Review of Books
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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 escape the past. The heroes of his fiction are all…
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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 what happens when authors eliminate the boundary altogether? By calling…
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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 yogurt. That Soho no longer exists, of course, but it’s…
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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 figure out what separates the books we talk about from…
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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 born.
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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 almost inevitably, all four. —Tony Judt, Night The human body…
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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 both good food and junk food, the only problem being…
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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 not its biographical detail but the spacious view it gives…
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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, I ought to be used to it, but I’m not.…
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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, Stoner. “Like the best works of historical fiction about the…
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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 Review of Books, Tim Parks tries to understand the correlation…
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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 night, and who smoked what and who was doing who…