Recent Posts

[→YD Recent Posts Widget]
  • Things and other things that shouldn’t meet August 1, 2010
    The value of things. […]
    Jeff Waxman
  • Q: What Says Francis Fukuyama like a Dead Squirrel in Tartan? August 1, 2010
    From Paper Cuts, we learn of The End of History, a 55% ABV beer infused with juniper and highland nettles that was inspired by Fukuyama's well-known essay of the same name. […]
    Jeff Waxman
  • Markson in Circulation August 1, 2010
    Thousands of David Markson’s books–from the man’s personal library, and with his extensive annotations–are for sale at The Strand.  “David wanted the books recirculated . . . . And really, if you face it, a university library, what are they going to do with them? They end up storing them. I think he [...] […]
    Jeff Waxman
  • Printers’ Ball in Chicago Tonight August 1, 2010
    Don't miss your chance to snatch up lots of free magazines and journals from small presses in Chicago and around the country at the Poetry Foundation's Printers' Ball tonight at Columbia College. […]
    Carrie Olivia Adams
  • Amazon drops prices and Galleycat snarks August 1, 2010
    Amazon is supposedly dropping the price on the Kindle to $139. The folks over at Galley Cat are not impressed. Even worse for Amazon, even less is Seth Godin. […]
    Soo Jin Oh

Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.

Group Reads

Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

Starting Sept 19, read one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

  • How Jeanette Winterson Makes Fiction
    Winterson has always told and retold the same fictions: of parents and children; of origins, and adoptions; of differences, of margins; of love; of passion; she has always manipulated rhythm and language as an excavation of sources. Much of her fiction mirrors what we know of Winterson's own story, but she agitates against the idea that her work has to […]
  • Inveterate and Unrepentant Book Collecting: A Guide to My Favorite Contact Sport
    It's difficult to pin down exactly why books as objects mean so much to me. I wasn't alive when William Goyen's excellent Come, The Restorer was published, but owning an original printing with the dust jacket—as it would have been purchased at the time of its release—makes the book more special to me than some beat-up paperback rei […]
  • The Master of the Not Quite: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood
    Wood can be harsh, yes, but he is seldom unfair. Wyatt Mason was wrong to accuse him of having suggested, by dint of a string of negative reviews, that no good contemporary literature exists. (He has written favorably of McEwan, Bolaño, Robinson, Ozick, Kirsch, Sebald, Roth, Saramago, Swift, Carey.) He never simply dismisses a writer (in the manor of, s […]
  • A Warehouse with an Epic Scope: Entrepôt by Mark McMorris
    To say that Mark McMorris's Entrepôt is about writing poetry is to do a huge disservice to this beautiful and penetrating book, whose ostensible subject of contemplation is how to live, love, and make do in a time of war, if not cultural crisis. On the other hand, the book's greatest service, at least to my eye, is in its exploration of just w […]

David Mamet: Closet Conservative

David Mamet: Closet Conservative

Not terribly surprised.

All this explains why David Mamet, America’s most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in which he announced that he had “changed my mind” about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of “a host of conservative writers,” among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called “our greatest contemporary philosopher”), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that “a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”

On balance, I suppose that if you’re more interested in describing your world as you find it than in wanting to aspire to make it better, liberalism probably isn’t for you.

The Humbling Lionel Trilling

The Humbling Lionel Trilling

Perhaps one day I’ll open an essay with a sentence this perfect.

Between The Fifth Column, the play which makes the occasion for this large volume, and The First Forty-Nine Stories, which make its bulk and its virtue, there is a difference of essence.

So many things that these few words do. On a purely functional level they define the difference between two bodies of work and and render judgment on them, while still intriguing the reader to know more despite the fact that judgment has been rendered (and thus the ostensible purpose of the review fulfilled). But then on a less superficial level they communicate–Hemingway! He is over the hill now, and I’m about to tell you why, while still demonstrating that I grasp the virtues of his youth and maybe even can tell you how he lost his way.

You can read the rest in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.

Latest Review

The National has published my review of Urdu-language author Qurratulian Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist. Hyder, who penned a book many have called Urdu’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, has clear talent, but Fireflies is perhaps not the best book to show it off. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Don’t Really Care About Touch Screens or Color

Don’t Really Care About Touch Screens or ColorShare

So Amazon has unveiled a new Kindle that goes as low as $139. (Not exactly sure where the $139 one is on the site, but I’m sure if you want it you’ll find it.)

One thing to note is that, so far, Amazon is sticking to its guns vis a vis color and touch-screen:

That kind of price point could make Kindle attractive to the mass market consumer. But anyone hoping for a color display or touch screen will have . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Your Moment of Dickens

From Our Mutual Friend, which can be had for free if you’re Kindled up, or simply Googled. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Miguel Syjuco in Canada

Miguel Syjuco in CanadaShare

Canada’s Walrus magazine has a summer fiction issue, with some noteworthy offerings. There is Ilustrado author Miguel Syjuco here, and recently Booker nominated Lisa Moore (for February) here.

On the Transnational Postmodern

One of the arguments often made on behalf of translated fiction is precisely that it provides us an avenue of increased acquaintance with “foreign” cultures, but a book like Natural Novel often seems to reflect our own culture back to American readers, both in literal references to American culture (“Remember how in Pulp Fiction Bruce Willis goes back to get his watch and decides to toast Pop Tarts, while Travolta is reading in the john?” one man asks another in a conversation about toilets) and in its fragmented and self-conscious narrative devices, most of which seem to me to derive primarily from American postmodernism–indeed, while writers like Calvino and Borges are among the original inspirations of literary postmodernism, that inspiration was initially and most fully expressed in postmodern American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

New Critical Flame

New Critical FlameShare

Issue 8 of The Critical Flame is online now, including a review of Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou:

This passage is indicative of the novel’s irreverent style and reveals Mabanckou as the rare kind of writer who can incorporate high literary allusions as well as bawdy humor. Mabanckou draws heavily on his predecessors as he pursues this project, and it is perhaps one of the most notable characteristics of Broken Glass that it is absolutely littered with literary allusions. French writers from Rimbaud to . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Title Kind of Says It All

At The Constant Conversation, Soo Jin Oh has penned Amazon Partners Up with Possibly the Most Hated Man on the Literary Scene. She delves into why Andrew Wylie has decided to try and be a “publisher”: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Jeanette Winterson at The Quarterly Conversation

Our latest piece at The Quarterly Conversation is Lauren Elkin’s essay on Jeanette Winterson. It’s all about how Winterson’s books trace out an interesting relationship to reality, and how that reality is transmuted into her work. . . . continue reading, and add your comments