My friend James Hynes’ Next is a departure from his prior novels in many ways, not least in that the action is set in a single day. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Tod Goldberg says the book, is “wildly inventive, stunning… an essential piece of American literature that is both of its time and ultimately without present compare.” Michael . . .
The Awl has published my examination of Sarah Palin’s fundamentalist background — a background not entirely dissimilar to my own. I have a hunch about what she’s up to with her new reality show, and it scares the hell of out me. When Sarah Palin began shopping around a “Planet Earth-type” reality series based in Alaska earlier this month, the . . .
Recently I was diagnosed with a disorder of the humors.* By a licensed gastroenterologist and everything. The bile thinners notwithstanding, I honestly can’t think of a verdict that would’ve pleased me more. So Aristotelian, so Elizabethan, so hypochondriacal and tied in with my mother’s weird religious ordering of the world. “I’m surprised they didn’t find fire and brimstone in there,” . . .
Robert Pinsky chooses the winners of the first 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Arts and Literature. My friend Amitava Kumar takes second prize; first goes to Tomasz Rozycki and third to Lydia Kiesling.
The WSJ runs Joan Schenkar’s insightful and very funny recollection of her paralyzing admiration for writer (and rumored witch) Shirley Jackson, the wife of her then-professor.