What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?
I've been bashfully mute amidst the chatter over Norman Rush's new novel, Mortals, because he wasn't on the modest list of Writers I Know About.
Jul 21, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Timothy Bradley
Badlands Badlands
It's always good fun to see a boy wax romantic over the first girl to give him a handjob--and if the boy should be a black-hatted Jew, the fun is only improved.
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Charlotte’s Web Charlotte’s Web
In 1890 the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a remarkable short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," about a woman--genteel, educated, with more than a casual taste f...
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick
Written in Memory Written in Memory
Helen Keller may be the world's most famous supercrip.
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Bérubé
The Bourgeois Revolutionary The Bourgeois Revolutionary
Publishers, even academic presses, know that the public likes biography and cater to this taste with a stream of handsomely produced, and often quite well-written, volumes.
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Robin Blackburn
Miles Davis Miles Davis
Most of what we know about the life of Miles Davis is either anecdotal or a matter of official record, and thus not absolutely reliable; but by all accounts, most pertinently h...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Lucius Shepard
The Girls of Summer The Girls of Summer
This Independence Day, the symbolic struggle being waged on thousands of screens across the Empire pits Reese Witherspoon against Arnold Schwarzenegger, gooey-sweet girl agains...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
The Road Map to Nowhere The Road Map to Nowhere
Although the laboriously negotiated and long-delayed Middle East "road map" received a diplomatic boost by the recent intervention of George W. Bush, the plan is replet...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Roane Carey
A Costly Friendship A Costly Friendship
Much of the talk in Europe these days--in newspaper offices, at dinner parties, in foreign ministries--is about how the United States and Britain were conned into going to war ...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Patrick Seale
Woody Guthrie Woody Guthrie
When Bob Dylan took the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, all leather and Ray-Bans and Beatle boots, and declared emphatically and (heaven forbid) electrically that he w...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Steve Earle