Author Archives:
The Art of Extra-Illustration
As an inveterate buyer of second-hand books, I’m used to finding supplemental material inside. Usually it’s in the form of newspaper or magazine clippings, either a review of the book in question or an article about the author. Every once in a while they get a bit more esoteric—a travel article from the book’s setting, [...]
Pocket Review: Long for This World by Sonya Chung
When a novel, particularly a debut novel, is referred to as “ambitious,” there’s usually an implicit “but” present. In Long for This World, Sonya Chung takes on the dynamics of family—what draws it together and what pulls it apart—through the eyes of a number of players, male and female, old and young, Korean and Korean-American. [...]
Codex Seraphinianus for the People
We’re looking at an exceptionally rainy, cold weekend here, and I don’t foresee any real reason to leave the house. So I was pleased to find out, via the Book Bench, that all of Luigi Serafini’s big, weird, trippy Codex Seraphinianus has been digitized and posted online. Serafini’s alternate world, complete with its own bizarre [...]
The Second Pass’ First Anniversary
In her keynote speech at last month’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, Arianna Huffington tossed out a good point on the way to her explanation of why she doesn’t pay bloggers. (“Self expression is the new entertainment…. We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching [...]
David Foster Wallace at the Ransom Center
Somewhere in a box, I have a number of notebooks from middle school and high school. Not all of them, but some kind of random sampling that my curatorial self saw fit, once upon a time, to save. Once in a while I’ll give in to the urge to look through one, and it always [...]
Open Letters Monthly, March 2010
The March issue of Open Letters Monthly is up. Somehow it feels like only a few weeks since we introduced the February issue… all right, four weeks.
This month leads off with Kathleen Rooney’s look at five poetry collections by women—Matthea Harvey, Katy Lederer, Brenda Shaughnessy, Robyn Schiff, and KarenVolkman—what they offer up and what they [...]
Reading Between the Cracks
Over on the PANK Blog, reviews editor Kirsty Logan discusses some dos and don’ts for Meanwhile Reads. I think readers who are fairly catholic in their tastes are especially predisposed to sort their literary experiences: You have your vacation reading, your bathroom reading, your insomnia reading, your commute reading. And this category of Meanwhile Reads—what [...]
Hef at 16
The thing that gets me, when I succumb to my own worst nature and watch an episode of Hoarders, isn’t the fear that I’m going to suddenly tip over into the dark side and become a hoarder myself. (Books don’t count.) It’s that, in the process of exercising healthy junk-disposal habits, I’m throwing out something [...]
Springtime and The Story Prize Awards
http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2010/03/day-after-tomorrow.html
Pimp My Article
Correction of the week comes from the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog, concerning David Remnick’s upcoming Obama bio:
An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; [...]
