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Like Fire
One of the things you’ll hear a lot about in any self-respecting MLS or Media Studies program is digital forensics—a good term, a little bit geeky and a little bit CSI. The idea, of course, is preservation. Archival collections are no longer just about flat fibrous printed stuff, but all the material used to carry [...]
Read MoreYou’ve got to give it to Buzzfeed—they do the lowest common denominator like nobody else. Even when they’re unpacking the quality stuff, you still have to pay attention to figure out which level of brow they’re aiming at. I know, I’m saying that like it’s a bad thing. It’s not—it’s what they do—but the sheer [...]
Read MoreDesign within reach is a great concept. But the definition of “reach” isn’t exactly a fixed quality; even on our best days, most of us aren’t LeBron James. So it’s good for everyone when nice things are priced nicely—you don’t expect to be able to buy a new sofa with change gleaned from the cushions [...]
Read MoreJust over three years ago, I reviewed what would prove to be one of my favorite books read in 2011. Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, aside from having one of the best titles of the decade, was a seriously fun hard-boiled noir coming of age tale set in 1963, featuring the Jewish [...]
Read MoreWednesday night’s Story Prize event was, as always, entertaining and edifying. There’s something about the chemistry of getting three very disparate short story writers together to read their work and talk about it—the distillery that goes into short fiction makes for some good, concentrated conversation among its practitioners, and three is a reasonable number for [...]
Read MoreThe Tournament of Books is off and running with a rousing opener, complete with intrigue, insults, and innuendo—who could ask for more? Each year the ToB opens with a pre-Tournament playoff round, a kind of throat-clearing to get readers in the groove, let them dust off their commenting IDs, and prepare everyone to sling a [...]
Read MoreSnow, huh Good God, y’all What is it good for? Absolutely nothing Say it again With all due apologies to Edwin Starr, I think this is how a good two-thirds of the country feels right now. No, really, I do understand the actual geo-meteorological necessity for snow, and why we need cold temperatures and snowpack [...]
Read MoreI don’t care much for self-help books, but I love literature that masquerades as self-help—Sheila Heti’s genius title, How Should a Person Be?, or Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful How to Live (or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer). I don’t think novels, or even philosophical essays, are going to [...]
Read More1963: To borrow a line from Frank Sinatra, it was a very good year. Many fine works saw the light of day in 1963, some celebrated and some unsung—but to get to the point, a lot of good books were published. (I bet you thought you knew where I was going with that, didn’t you?) [...]
Read MoreThe writer is a passionate animal; two writers in the same space, physical or virtual, will lock horns pleasingly often. I say “pleasingly” because—let’s face it—watching articulate types go at it is always fun. Sometimes these feuds raise real questions; more often they’re vaguely embarrassing to all parties involved. Once in a while reputations are [...]
Read MoreP.S. The parts underlined in green are links… there’s one thing that doesn’t translate too well from paper to pixel. (Paper: Field Notes FN-01 graph paper notebook. Pen: Lamy Safari.)
Read MoreI remember very little of what I read in my high school English classes. Some titles have stuck: Jude the Obscure, 1984, Émile Zola’s Germinal, the requisite profusion of Shakespeare. But given four years in a class that was supposedly my favorite, those are some terrible statistics. Granted, a lot of that is probably due [...]
Read MoreIf I had a little more time on my hands, or at least a little more patience, this would be the time to make up some cards for Book Award Bingo. Short lists are out this week from the National Book Critics Circle, The Tournament of Books, and my perennial favorite award ceremony, The Story [...]
Read MoreFrances and Bernard Carlene Bauer Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013 Carlene Bauer’s debut novel, Frances and Bernard, reminded me why I enjoy reading letters so much, either in collections of correspondence or as epistolary fiction. Letters are a step up from journal writing in their self-conscious display of innermost philosophical workings, and when done right they’re [...]
Read MoreMy Education Susan Choi Viking Adult, 2013 Schadenfreude is a wonderful thing: we can watch empires fall and wonder why they didn’t have better homeowners’ insurance or more canned goods, whatever satisfies that secret need for smugness that we all need to indulge once in a while. A novel entitled My Education promises something along [...]
Read More… for all good bloggers reflect on the past 12 months of whatever it is they write about, and although I’m generally resistant to anything that everybody else is doing, I’m so pleased to have a little time on my hands right now that I find myself wanting to put in my two cents as [...]
Read MoreThe long list for the 2014 Tournament of Books is up; let the opining begin. Out of the 90-odd novels listed I’ve read eight, own another four, and have six or so more either on library hold or vaguely wishlisted. That means I stand a half decent shot of being able to hold forth in [...]
Read MoreThis time of year brings out not only the list-makers, but the list-lovers and list-haters as well. The literary ether seems to be especially ripe for that kind of debate, maybe because these end-of-year best-ofs can seem wan in comparison to the the jockeying of all the literary awards scattered throughout the calendar. Or maybe [...]
Read MoreInstead of a Letter: A Memoir Diana Athill W.W. Norton & Company, 2010 Diana Athill grew up expecting to have a conventional life for a woman of her time: she’d get married, have children, and live happily ever after. That was how things worked when you were a woman born in England in 1917 to [...]
Read MoreI don’t pretend to know much about poetry criticism… at least not to the degree that I pretend to know all sorts of things about prose criticism. But I do like reading it, even if a lot of what’s being proposed probably sails right over my head. Which is why I like reading Stephen Burt—aside [...]
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