Andrew Seal argues that “Chicago and New York are to U.S. fiction what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are to the Russians. Sorry, Boston. Sorry, L.A. Sorry, D.C. Sorry, San Fran. Sorry, the South. You have your claims, no doubt, but they are as the claims of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, or Gogol.” Discuss. […]

Phelan goes on to say, "There will, I’m sure, be no consensus about what constitutes badness or whether it belongs to the book, the reader, the situation of reading, all of the above, or none of the above," though he's almost wrong there. The list is pretty varied, from the morally-bankrupt to the so-bad-it's-good varieties, though gene […]

Wherein we learn that Imperial hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves and “Vollmann was exceptionally gracious as both host and interview subject, quite generous with his whiskey and his time.” […]

In some of the best news ever, Margaret Atwood is going to have a cameo in a movie musical about hockey. Seriously. I am — what is the word? – giddy. Don’t believe me? Atwood discusses it on her blog. Can this news get better? Hell, yes. The movie also stars Olivia Newton-John. […]

New issue of the New York Review of Books is out, with Colm Tóibín on exile lit. […]

With jokes from Joyce Carol Oates and "wild imaginings" from 92-year-old winner Diana Athill -- not to mention talk of a sequel from "Wolf Hall" author Hilary Mantel -- this year's NBCC Awards were noteworthy for their celebration of literature by women. […]

DFW's latest cover makeover, plus a great-looking cover and a really not-so-great-looking cover. […]

Since buying The Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens at City Lights, I’ve been rereading many Stevens poems and trying to understand it from a more mature perspective.  Last time I read a vast amount of Stevens was when I was 22 for a class on Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and Marianne Moore.  With fifteen years [...] […]

The 2010 Best Translated Book Awards were announced last night at Idlewild Books, Manhattan. The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated by Dalya Bilu won the fiction award, and the poetry award went to Elena Fanailova for The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler. Check out the [...] […]

The National Book Critics Circle Award is announcing their winners tonight.  The diversity of their nominations, from the better known (such as Hilary Mantel and Mary Karr) to the less mainstream (such as Rachel Zucker and Eula Biss), makes the blog entries on the nominees an interesting read.  I added Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with [...] […]