Blog


“P.S. I am poor.”

Art in the face of poverty: Jill Lepore’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe is oddly, blithely withering, but it’s informative.

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Coetzee on Beckett

“Not that I care. I don’t want to be a professor.” J.M. Coetzee reads Samuel Beckett’s letters.

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Woman Writing Man: a dispatch from Laila Lalami

I’ve been looking forward to my friend Laila Lalami’s first novel since her story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published back in 2005. Secret Son is finally out today, and — although, having witnessed its transformation over a couple of drafts, I’m not entirely objective — it’s well, well worth the wait. Youssef, who’s grown up in a . . .

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The voice of Joseph Heller

At some low level, I always imagined Joseph Heller sounded more or less like Norman Mailer. I was wrong. Here the Catch-22 author talks about the United States’ political system (“ludicrously funny”). It’s disgusting, he says, to realize that there are organizations devoted to grooming candidates — telling them what to wear, how to speak, and the like — but . . .

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