February 2012
6 posts
The Millions : The Literary Pedigree of Downton... →
January 2012
19 posts
“If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be...
“After all, what people like about post-“Sopranos” cable TV — its complexity, its density, its moral ambiguity or even depravity — lines up with what they like about literary fiction. […] Novelists who used to lament the rise of television now want a chance to write for it, and that says something about the evolution of cable TV — and maybe about the evolution of literary...
Now That Books Mean Nothing - The Morning News →
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the...”
– James Baldwin
The Millions : Most Anticipated: The Great 2012... →
Varamo by Cesar Aira
Zona by Geoff Dyer
The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
New American Haggadah ed. by Jonathan Safran Foer, trans. by Nathan Englander
Bolano
Susan Sontag’s journals, second vol.
Home by Toni Morrison
New Ways to Kill...
“Literatures are self-referential by nature, and even when references to Scripture in contemporary fiction and poetry are no more than ornamental or rhetorical — indeed, even when they are unintentional — they are still a natural consequence of the persistence of a powerful literary tradition. Biblical allusions can suggest a degree of seriousness or significance their context in a modern...
“WRITING THE STORY of the Holocaust is a futile ambition—not because the events of 1939 to 1945 are too horrible to be told, but because they are too various to be compressed into one definitive or representative story. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis came from every part of Europe, from every social class and profession and age group, from every point on the spectrum of Jewish life...
ID now needed for drain cleaner - Quad Cities... →
December 2011
15 posts
An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry |... →
Paris cleans lipstick off Oscar Wilde grave |... →
November 2011
14 posts
As readers of Mr. Hughes’s earlier books well know, he is highly opinionated, especially on all matters aesthetic, and never pulls his punches. “We cannot make the mistake with Romans of supposing that they were refined, like the Greeks they envied and imitated,” he writes near the end of this volume. “They tended to be brutes, arrivistes, nouveaux-riches. Naturally, that is why they continue to...
