Ancient Laughter
What does a satire by Veronica Geng have in common with Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment? What do either have in common with Gilbert Godfried’s famous performance of “The…
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New York Review of Books
94 posts
New Orleans Decoded
Tempted to move to New Orleans? It seems as though more and more writers are heading there these days. At the New York Review of Books, Nathaniel Rich—who moved to the city in…
Suffering for Our Entertainment
Piper Kerman, author of the memoir Orange is the New Black, is a vocal spokesperson for the rights of prisoners. But, asks April Bernard on the New York Review of Books…
On Changing Things
Over at the New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks gives us a short, historical narrative concerned with the ways in which our changing attention spans have altered our…
Takin’ It to the Tweets
Last Friday, the CIA officially joined Twitter with a joke: We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet. But the New York Review of Books wasn’t…
A Parenthetical Suffering
According to Christopher Benfey, literature has a long history of writers including characters’ personal struggles in parentheses within the text. To learn how that worked in Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Virginia…
Poetry Fight
The 1968 Stony Brook World Poetry Conference brought together more than 100 poets of varying styles and personalities. After a boozy weekend, at the farewell party, emotions (and presumably alcohol)…
Suprisingly Whimsical
A couple weeks old, but always fresh: the poet Charles Simic writes on the NYR’s blog about the language that sticks, both on and off the page. Simic has a…
“The Woes of the Wannabe”
The prospect of publication, the urgent need, as they see it, to publish as soon as possible, colors everything [my students] do….It will be hard for those who have never…
The Accidental Buddhist
“When writing a book once about the Dalai Lama, I was startled to realize that the very core of one of his lessons was expressed for me by none other…
Trapped Inside the Novel
My problem with the grand traditional novel—or rather traditional narrative in general, short stories included—is the vision of character, the constant reinforcement of a fictional selfhood that accumulates meaning through…
NYRB Joins LRB in Hole, Helps Keep Digging
As we’ve documented pretty extensively before, arts organization VIDA has done a lot to expose gender inequality in the writing world with its annual count comparing female bylines to male ones in a…