Archive for December, 2008

Wilde, a postmortem

A new book about Oscar Wilde’s library inspires the TLS to exhume a 1963 look at the author’s legacy. (Via.)

Read more



On Sontag’s notebooks

Minna Proctor is surprised to find Susan Sontag’s revealing notebooks reminiscent of her other published work — at least in temperament.

Read more




Anya Ulinich: Jonathan Safran Foer not my punching bag

I read Anya Ulinich’s latest story, The Nurse and the Novelist, as a smart satirical comment on the contemporary shtetl-fantasy novel. New York’s Michael Idov, on the other hand, reads it as an “entire work of fiction [written] with the sole purpose of a barely disguised personal attack on Jonathan Safran Foer.”   I asked the author how she felt . . .

Read more



Happy weekend from the domestic shooting target

My mother didn’t know most of the many women her dad married, but in email last year casually referred to a shooting. Of her father. By one of the wives. Next (I think) he married a woman named Evelyn, and, believe it or not, they lived on Daniels Avenue on SMU campus right down the street from my sorority house . . .

Read more



Newsletter Signup

For regular updates, subscribe to my free newsletter.