Articles by Michael Bourne
June 21, 2012
Appearing Elsewhere 2
Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York’s trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
June 19, 2012
Our First Jadak President: David Maraniss’ Barack Obama 3
Barack Obama is a wholly new kind of American president, part white, part African, who wears sarongs and is fluent in Hawaiian pidgin.
May 23, 2012
Across the Border: Richard Ford’s Canada 7
One comes away from Canada feeling as though a less gifted author was trying to write a knock-off of a Richard Ford novel, and has made a hash of it.
May 8, 2012
Appearing Elsewhere 0
The spiffy new Los Angeles Review of Books website has posted my review of Ben Fountain’s new novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
May 3, 2012
America’s Jug-Eared Achilles: Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power 2
In this five-volume biography, Caro is trying to write the epic poem of The American Century, with tall, jug-eared, foul-mouthed LBJ as his flawed tragic hero.
April 30, 2012
The Bathrobe Era: What the Death of Print Newspapers Means for Writers 21
We are creating a generation of riff artists, who see their job not as creating wholly new original projects but as commenting upon cultural artifacts that already exist.