Staff Picks
November 29, 2012
A Younger, Stranger America: On Harry Houdini’s The Right Way to Do Wrong 0
by Emily St. John Mandel
The collection functions as a glimpse into a fascinating world of low-rent, high-risk stunt performing that’s largely faded away.
October 29, 2012
Staff Pick: The New Jim Crow 4
by Michael Bourne
Thanks in large part to the drug war, more than 2 million people, disproportionate numbers of them black and Hispanic, are locked up in America’s prisons, giving us an incarceration rate of 750 per 100,000 people, higher than in Russia, China or Iran.
October 18, 2012
Back in the USSR: On Maurice DeKobra’s The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars 0
by Emily St. John Mandel
This is the kind of book that gets described as “a delightful romp” in press materials, and that’s not an inaccurate description of a book that functions beautifully as both send-up of high society and globe-spanning adventure story, but the novel has a deathly serious core.
October 4, 2012
Susanna Moore, Cheryl Strayed, and the Place Where the Writers Work 8
by Emily St. John Mandel
What matters is good writing, what matters is that there are people who love books enough to press them into your hands in far-off cities. We are here for the books, but I think it’s easy to get distracted by our longing for success and forget this.
August 20, 2012
A Book for the Dog Days of Summer 2
by Lydia Kiesling
As Murphy and Wasik stress again and again, this is a horrible disease; its grotesque symptoms, its uncurable-ness, its unpredictable incubation time, and its ideal vector–the dog–give it a unique place in the human psyche.
July 31, 2012
Staff Pick: Saul Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection 2
by Emily St. John Mandel
Do the ones who save us owe us anything? The Bellarosa Connection is fascinating as a study of memory and regret.