New York Times Book Review
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Courageous Music: Jane Mead’s To the Wren: Collected & New Poems
Her poems make felt observations sing, no matter the subject.
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Ponsot’s Patience
The poet Marie Ponsot is a late-blooming ninety-five. For the New York Times Book Review, William Logan reviews her new Collected Poems (Knopf), and follows her arc from early “secondhand Tolkein,” to a letting go of “hollow immensities.” “We read such…
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A Novel Debut
Over at the New York Times Book Review, Leslie Jamison and Ayana Mathis write about the excitement surrounding debut novelists’ work. “It’s like hearing an overture at the beginning of a symphony, the introduction of themes and preoccupations that will…
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The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Stein
Leigh Stein discusses her new memoir, Land of Enchantment, co-founding Out of the Binders, and why most of her projects begin as “an idea that someone else pushes back on.”
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This Week in Short Fiction
There’s a new short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the world this week, and it’s a Mrs. Dalloway-style imagination of a day in the life of Melania Trump as she plans a dinner party. The story, titled “The Arrangements,”…
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Reading against Time
As a child, I loved it when a book took me somewhere else. I still do, but I’m more surprised and grateful now to be transported by words on a page from one world to another. Perhaps because, as grown-ups,…
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The Incompletist
I was excited to see the New York Times’s announcement that a regular column by the writer Geoff Dyer called “Reading Life” would be appearing in their weekend Book Review. I was even more intrigued and, somehow, encouraged, when eventually…
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The Great American Novel(s)?
This idea — that one person, and only one person, in any given generation can possess the intellectual prowess, creative might, emotional intelligence and writing chops to produce a novel that speaks truth about the disparate American whole — is…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Some story collections drop with fireworks and great fanfare, while others make their entrance, it could be said, on tender feet. The latter is the case with the works of Edith Pearlman, who released her fifth story collection, Honeydew, on…
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The Year of Reading Women
For the New York Times, Alexander Chee reflects on Joanna Walsh’s effort to get people to read only women during 2014 and the revelations female writers have given him.
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An End to Bookends
At Salon, Molly Fischer criticizes the New York Times’s “Bookends” column, going so far as to suggest that the it be eliminated for good. She compares the question-and-answer formats — and the content of the prompts — as reminiscent of…
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Travel Writing for Summer Reading
The New York Times Book Review recently published a summer reading special issue. In it, the terrific British travel writer and novelist Lawrence Osborne has an essay on travel writing, along with some summer reading recommendations. He writes about books…