New York Review of Books
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LARB vs. NYRB
The East Coast and the West Coast have had their spats, but in the end, our respective lit scenes form one big, happy, bicoastal family, right? Right?! That might not seem like the case if you’re following the events outlined…
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Women Still Not Equal in Writing World
VIDA, the organization that tracks the status of women in the writing world, has posted their annual count of female writers published in major literary magazines in comparison to male writers published in the same places. This year, they’ve posted…
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Allan Gurganus on John Cheever
Over at The New York Review of Books, writer Allan Gurganus gives us a peek into his relationship with John Cheever while Gurganus was but a mere student in his twenties, and Cheever was The John Cheever, living in Iowa,…
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NYR’S Apocalpyse Now
Malise Ruthven of the New York Review of Books blog ruminates on the history of apocalyptic rhetoric in literature, art, and politics from the Enlightenment to now. Ruthven focuses on the paradox of apocalyptic thinking where “prophets who predict the…
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A Soldier’s Handbook
The New York Review of Books covers the recently published guidebook given to American soldiers before heading to Vietnam: “Most American soldiers landing in Vietnam in the 1960s were handed a ninety-three-page booklet called A Pocket Guide to Vietnam. Produced by the Department…
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Against an Ethical Machine
Rejected by the early Soviet state, Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky published only nine stories in his lifetime; luckily his novel The Letter Killers Club is now available in English.
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Remembering Tony Judt
Tony Judt, the British historian and social critic, died last Friday at 62 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Although it left him nearly paralyzed, his brain was unimpaired, as evidenced by the series…
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The Boring, Unplayful, Unoriginal Global Novel
“What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international…
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“Shakespeare would have eased off the puns”
“What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way…
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Childhood as a Branch of Cartography
“We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could…