Recent Posts

  • If you can’t sell books, sell teddy bears September 3, 2010
    Or that seems to be Borders’ solution to its constant financial problems, at least for the time being until the next quarter with lower than expected sales.  Really, the problem with Borders is that it lost its identity about eight or so years ago when it decided to become a shadow of Barnes & Noble.   [...] […]
    Soo Jin Oh
  • Reflections on Rockwell September 3, 2010
    In recent years, fans of Norman Rockwell, with the assistance of some art historians, have attempted to lift him into the canon of high art. As a fan of midcentury American illustration, I don’t really care how he is assessed on that scale: like the recurring fantasy that underlies so much of our politics of [...] […]
    Levi Stahl
  • A Taste of Cherry in a Heat Wave September 3, 2010
    I’ve been thinking a lot about heat waves. The thick summer weather has felt like a wall of fire that must be bravely pushed through to order to exit from an air conditioned office building and make my way to the corner to board a bus crowded with sweaty citizens. So perhaps it’s no surprise that [...] […]
    Carrie Olivia Adams
  • The Ballad of David Markson September 3, 2010
    "What’s not so up for dispute is that Markson accomplished what, by all rights, should be a literary impossibility." (Colin Marshall for The Millions) […]
    Jeff Waxman
  • Gass-X September 3, 2010
    "Ich liebe dich. No sentence pronounced by a judge could be more threatening. It means that you are about to receive a gift you may not want." Via Dylan Suher, Greg Gerke's sort-of review of William H. Gass's Reading Rilke in BIG OTHER. […]
    Jeff Waxman

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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

  • In Homer’s Head: Ransom by David Malouf
    In Ransom, Malouf satisfyingly gives us a meeting between Priam and Achilles that builds from the interiority of Priam. The novel seems to want to teach the importance of doing something human to those who might never get around to picking up Homer or who, if they do, might wish they could get into the character's heads. […]
  • 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 […]

Amazon Purchases

Amazon Purchases

Seems like it would be fun and perhaps a bit revealing to check in every so often and see what readers are buying through the Amazon links on this site. So here’s the first in what will be an occasional look at what you bought through my links.

I went back to April 1 to compile this list–6 months.

  • By far, the most popular purchase was The Invention of Morel by Adolfo BIoy Casares. These purchases were quite obviously in direct correlation to this post, in which I exhorted everyone to read Morel after writing a short piece on the book for Boldtype. Those of you who took on Morel after my recommendation should read my essay on Bioy for more on this work and others by him.

  • After that, we get into a few books that tied: Senselessness, 2666, The Siege of Krishnapur, and A Rhetoric of Irony are among them. Senselessness I’ve mentioned a lot, so I’ll refer readers back to my previous remarks on that book. Ditto for 2666.

    The Siege of Krishnapur is a novel I read a number of years ago. Its one of my favorite reads of the last few years, but it’s fairly neglected (NYRB Classics publishes it in the U.S.). I was inspired to write about it after it became a finalist for the Booker of the Bookers and received a wave of media attention.

    A Rhetoric of Irony I haven’t gone out of my way to single out for attention, but I have had reason to mention it in a few posts. It’s a great, very readable work of criticism by a great critic.

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1 comment to Amazon Purchases

  • reader

    Thank you for the Senselessness posts – I enjoyed the book. And, wow! The Siege of Krishnapur is part of a trilogy!! I now need to get the other two..

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