Articles by Bezalel Stern
July 20, 2011
On Treating Books Badly 20
Books as books – as tangible things you can hold in your hands and show off to curious onlookers on the subway and friends who visit your apartment – are something I hold in high esteem. But there is, as I say, some pleasure in letting go, in allowing a book to get wet, in treasuring a book not for what it looks like but for what it says.
May 11, 2011
‘Was Guilt Innocent?’ The Books of Harry Mulisch 5
The Assault, probably Harry Mulisch’s most well known work, is to my mind the best account ever written of being a non-Jew in an occupied Nazi territory.
October 19, 2010
Hemingway, Michaels, Bellows: The Art of the Episodic Short Story 5
Finishing a story – a good, well-written story – about a character both well developed and personally intriguing, and knowing that another story about that very same character is out there somewhere, has become, for me, one of the best feelings in the world.
August 20, 2010
On Coincidence, Love, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being 6
Death is hidden somewhere in the middle of the book, and it doesn’t mean a thing.
September 28, 2009
The Impish Delight of Edward Gorey 2
Two assumptions are often made about the magnificent writer and illustrator Edward Gorey. First, that he is British. Second, that he is long dead.
August 4, 2009
Nabokov, Wallace, and the Incredible Shrinking Book 3
I was vaguely shocked and cautiously appalled to learn last week that Vladimir Nabokov’s “new” novel, The Original of Laura, due for release in August, isn’t, in fact, much of a novel at all. “This very unfinished work reads largely like an outline, full of seeming notes-to-self, references to source material, self-critique, sentence fragments and [...]
