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Like Fire
If you work in publishing, or are looking for a job in publishing, you may have seen the help wanted ad posted by Dalkey Archive Press last week. The University of Illinois-based press is looking to expand its London office and move on from founder John O’Brien’s stewardship, with two or three people at the [...]
Read MoreNot particularly literary, I guess, but for anyone as in need of a little inner peace as I’ve been this weekend, I offer you artist Tim Knowles’ Tree Drawings: A series of drawings produced using drawing implements attached to the tips of tree branches, the wind’s effects on the tree, recorded on paper. Like signatures [...]
Read MoreWith all due apologies for the end-of-semester posting paucity—one more week and we should be back on a somewhat more regular schedule—I have a new piece up at Bloom. Being the site’s Senior Writer holds all sorts of fine perks: a corner office, expense-account lunches, glamour, prestige… well, OK. Maybe not. But I can bring [...]
Read MoreSome three years ago, I wrote a post here that touched on several things, including some satisfying book art, Joseph Cornell, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, his book-length exploration of the reasons he became a vegetarian. (And where I once again prominently used the word “aleatory”—if only this were a drinking game!) I ended [...]
Read MoreSome people plan their dream wedding in great detail, furnish their dream home, or dress their dream children. Me, I stock my dream secondhand bookstore. So it was a treat to find a dreamy little Page-Turner piece by my Open Letters Monthly colleague (and Wall Street Journal Fiction Chronicle writer) Sam Sacks on what, exactly, [...]
Read MoreWe’ve made it to the middle of November, and it is with a grateful sense of continuity that I direct your attention to the recently announced IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist. Regular readers know that this is one of my favorite literary competitions for a number of reasons: The books are nominated by librarians worldwide [...]
Read MoreWe’re delighted to announce the launch of Bloom, a new literary site devoted to highlighting, profiling, reviewing, and interviewing authors whose first book was published when they were age 40 or older. Bloom is also a community of artists and readers who believe that “late” is a relative term, not an absolute one, and who [...]
Read MoreRemember Future Shock? I was a bit young for Alvin Toffler’s manifesto on the disorientations of technological change when it first came out, but when I finally got to it another 15 years down the line, it was still relevant. At the same time, though, I was young enough to feel deeply smug when I [...]
Read MoreAttention abecedarians: absolutely aching to access awesome alphabetic art? Attendez: Alphabet Apocrypha. Formerly titled Alphabet Horror Vacui, Nathan O. Marsh’s illustrated alphabetic cabinet of curiosities is a dark and wonderful marvel. His comic, rendered in crowquill pen and ink and watercolor, harkens back to naturalist engravings of yore, but Marsh’s alliterative inventions bounce back and [...]
Read MoreThe Dog Stars Peter Heller Knopf, 2012 Everybody’s got that secret genre that does it for them, am I right? Pirate tales, British cozies, sparkly vampires, or some combination of all of the above—hell, that would do it for anyone, come to think of it. Even the most diehard literary snob has some embarrassingly tangible [...]
Read MoreWhen it comes to digitizing older and orphan works, most of the copyright controversies I see cropping up have more to do with intellectual property issues than actual conflict. Which is about what you’d expect—any real litigation is going to be hammered out in court rather than in the public debate arena. But what happens [...]
Read MoreIt’s corny but true: Book people are always fussing with their shelves. Forget about the cliché of art books artfully arranged on the coffee table; forget about shoving that copy of Vogue underneath the London Review of Books when company’s coming. The tendency to be voyeuristic with one’s own home library and rearrange it now [...]
Read MoreLast month I commended the PEN American Center for awarding its Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction to E.L. Doctorow. Often it seems like that kind of recognition celebrates an author’s longevity, but not necessarily a consistent body of work. It’s not that writers don’t deserve props for sticking it out and keeping [...]
Read MoreI’ve long maintained that my love of New York Review Books extended only as far as the realm of print—that aside from the wise choices in backlist matter it’s their graphic presence, their savory cover stock and tasteful graphics, their perfectly portable size, their handfeel—that makes an NYRB Classic such a harmonious physical object. I [...]
Read MoreThe Man Booker Prize judges have announced their shortlist, narrowing down their original dozen by half. It’s an interesting selection, made up—as the Booker website is eager to point out— of “two debut novels, three small independent publishers, two former shortlisted authors and one previous winner. Of the six writers, three are men and three [...]
Read MoreThe golden era of social satire is… yeah, OK, kind of over. In this age of irony, its time may have come and gone. But satire once had its uses, primarily to hold up a funhouse mirror to human foibles in an otherwise earnest world. Ideally, this was hoped to bring about social change through [...]
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