salon
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Not That Kind of Narrator
The problem with unreliable narrators — and the thing that makes them so delightful to read in fiction — is that by design, you never quite know when they are telling the truth. Which makes it a stunningly poor choice…
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Prof. David Foster Wallace
We can approach the books from a variety of different critical, theoretical, and ideological perspectives, too, depending on students’ backgrounds and interests. In essence, we can talk about whatever you wish to — provided that we do it cogently and…
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A History of the New York Times Notable Books
For Salon, Laura Miller dug through two decades’ worth of the New York Times Notable Books to see how the list has evolved over the years.
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Gotta Serve Somebody
In an excerpt from his recently released book Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, Adam Kirsch positions David Foster Wallace as a quintessentially American writer: self-conscious and ironic, but at the same time frenzied, earnest, and above all…
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Reading: A National Priority
At Salon, James Patterson speaks with Erin Keane about his upcoming campaign to encourage reading, including “a television ad featuring a public book burning, and a request to President Obama that he pledge to make reading a national priority.”
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Lydia Kiesling Is Not Done Reading
Lydia Kiesling discovered Meghan Daum after reading the writer’s profile of Lena Dunham in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. As she chronicles in Salon, she didn’t stop there.
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Seriously, Though
At Salon, Lydia Millet gets serious about sexism, climate change and extinction, and the literary establishment’s dismissal of funny books: “Important” serious books often seem to be picked based on the simplicity and safety of their content as a barometer…
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Washington Irving’s Shy Spirit
Staying the night in Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s “Tarrytown retreat,” Salon’s Elizabeth Bradley wonders why the “stories endure, [but] why they leave their author behind.” That is, why has “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” seeped into the American consciousness, but the…
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Amazon’s Competition
At Salon, Emily Gould responds to Matt Yglesias’s Vox piece on Amazon, emphasizing his weakest point (“Amazon faces lots of competition”), while also acknowledging that his criticism of the publishing industry isn’t entirely off-base.
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Sperm Puppets All
Writing and sex have a lot in common, least enjoyable their knack for making participants feel vulnerable and insecure. But when anything goes, writers produce work that is beautiful for this very vulnerability: Believe it or not, the resulting scenes…
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Of Low Extraction and Irregular Education
Salon has published another delightful excerpt from Jonathon Green’s The Vulgar Tongue: Green’s History of Slang. Where the first focused on sex euphemism, this piece explores slang’s impact on the literary legacy of the English language. Wagtails, grizzles, and shotten…