Longtime readers know that I’m endlessly entertained by the bilaterally condescending friendship that sprang up between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov in the mid-1900s. Reading Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s, I was amused to discover a review — dated September 9, 1944 — excoriating Nabokov’s puns. (The book under consideration is Nabokov’s study of Nikolai . . .
Emma Garman admires the novels of rock-star Parisian writer Amélie Nothomb — but less so a new Holocaust reality show parable.
A posthumous collection of Muriel Spark’s writings will include her oddly compelling lunch party photo.
This Thursday night at the Brooklyn Public Library, Akashic Books celebrates ten years of reverse-gentrifying the literary world. “I think that literature should be consumed by more than just the well-educated,” founder and publisher Johnny Temple told the IHT earlier this year. “[W]e don’t need to just keep trying to sell books to the same people, these people for sure . . .