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    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.   [...] […]
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    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 [...] […]
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  • 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 [...] […]
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    "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. […]
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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

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  • 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 […]

New James Wood

New James Wood

The good James Wood that likes to dissect the workings of new and interesting books (as opposed to the big-game author-hunting version) has published a rather enlightening essay in the LRB:

Pilcrow is a peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic book.
It is admirably courageous, both in what it heaps on us, and in what it
holds back. While it drops us deep into the everyday, it boldly refuses
the everyday consolations of plot and dramatic structure. John’s
brother and sister barely appear. His father and mother, though vividly
drawn, are somewhat arrested in their 1950s roles – quiet breadwinner
and anxious, emotional housewife. A larger question – of what these
five hundred or so very talented pages amount to – is not quite
answered by the book in hand. The problem with the parodic patina is
that you are still reading a conventional coming-of-age gay fiction,
and a conventional story about an English boys’ school, with all the
usual stuff about wet dreams and wanking and flogging, and bottoms and
trouser-bulges. Mars-Jones’s desire to make John’s disability seem
normal – itself no small fictional triumph, since we entirely inhabit
this invented world – is in danger of cancelling out the originality of
that disability, and hence half of the novel’s raison d’être. If John
seems too pathetically disabled, then the novel comes uneasily close to
the pessimism of ‘One Arm’ – homosexuality and disability unpleasantly
twinned; but if John becomes too healthy in his disability, then the
disability seems a little pointless, and the battle against the
moralism of ‘One Arm’ a hollow gesture.

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