The Roots of the Paperback
“Gutenberg may have invented the movable-type printing press,” but the father of the paperback is a different man: Aldus Manutius. As reported in the New York Times, an exhibition opened…
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New York Times
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The Joys of Reading Jorie
At the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Jorie Graham’s new collected, From the New World: 1976-2014. Graham is a giant of American poetry, and the volume follows her career…
The Trouble with Pronouns
I would never have consented to writing the story using a gendered pronoun for Sasha, but when that approach was rejected, writing without using pronouns at all seemed like a…
The Lost Art of Reviewing
Book reviewing is still a heavily debated topic within the literary world. This week, the New York Times’s Bookends column has James Parker and Anna Holmes answering the question, “Is book…
Searching for Cervantes
After a Times article last March criticized Spain (and its literary establishment) for failing to unravel the mystery of the precise location of Miguel de Cervantes’s grave, a reinvigorated search…
Word of the Day: Euonymous
(adj.); having a well or suitable name From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. —Neal…
The Value of an Education
A graduate of Chabot College, Tom Hanks defends President Obama’s new community college proposal, explaining the benefits of his free education in the New York Times.
Facebook: New Platform for Extremist Death Threats
Shortly after Kamel Daoud’s Counter-Investigation fell short of winning the Goncourt Prize, the Algerian author received a Facebook death threat from an Islamist preacher calling the author “an enemy of religion.” Now, Daoud fights…
Charles D’Ambrosio’s Fast Friends
For the New York Times, Phillip Lopate reviews Charles D’Ambrosio’s new essay collection, Loitering, and explains why he thinks that D’Ambrosio, in essays, has “found the perfect medium.”
The Scorpion Always Bites the Turtle
During Amazon’s skirmish with Hachette, one group that rallied to Amazon’s defense were the self-published authors who claimed that the Kindle allowed their overlooked voices a platform. Now, those authors…
Behind the Scenes with Beckett
In a piece for the Times’s Sunday Book Review, Paul Muldoon leads a fascinating and warm-hearted expedition through the letters and poems of Samuel Beckett, new volumes of which will…
The New York Times Uncensored
At Slate, Justin Peters argues that the New York Times’s policy on profanity is in desperate need of updating.