“Lost things have their own special category. So long as they’re lost, and felt to be lost, they belong to the imagination and live more vividly than before. They make a mystery.” — Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk. Birkerts’ best personal essays are steeped in an anxious nostalgia that is, in intensity if not in focus, all too familiar to . . .
I spoke with the Nervous Breakdown’s Brad Listi for an hour last month about writing, blogging, day jobs, personal stuff, and why I’m not reviewing nowadays. You can listen at Other People Podcast.
On the heels of news that Junot Díaz will have a new collection of stories out this fall, the Times reports that he wrote the introduction to the Library of America’s forthcoming reissue of the pulp novel Princess of Mars.
My latest New York Times Magazine columnlet draws on a passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (1921) about the word “bug.” “An Englishman,” he says, restricts its use “very rigidly to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of my acquaintance once greatly . . .
Ellen Ullman’s By Blood is a dark, brooding, and marvelous novel that doesn’t really resemble anything else, though disparate elements of it remind me of so many stories I love. The book combines a disturbing confessional intensity, as in Coetzee’s Disgrace, Lasdun’s Horned Man, and Tartt’s The Secret History, with a paranoid claustrophobia akin to that of The Conversation, Coppola’s . . .