Staff Picks
September 16, 2011
Staff Pick: Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock 0
by Emily St. John Mandel
In Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 noir novel, a Manhattan writer is given the unenviable task of tracking himself down.
August 29, 2011
Staff Pick: Daniele Mastrogiacomo’s Days of Fear 1
by Emily St. John Mandel
In the spring of 2007, the Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo arrived in Afghanistan. He was there to conduct an interview with a Taliban commander, but the promised interview was a trap.
August 25, 2011
Staff Picks: Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth 8
by Garth Risk Hallberg
With its gallons of bodily fluids and its frankness about the attendant pneumatics, Sabbath’s Theater makes Nicholson Baker’s “manstarch” look like marzipan, and The Rosy Crucifixion look like Make Way for Ducklings.
July 28, 2011
Staff Pick: Baseball Playbook 1
by Patrick Brown
“You might have to coach Little League in a few years,” my father told me, handing me a strange, plain book. My son was a week old. It would be at least two years before he would learn to throw a cut fastball (and probably another year or two before he had any real command of the pitch).
July 28, 2011
Through A Glass, Clearly: Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars 5
by Michael Bourne
One comes away from Ghost Wars with two seemingly paradoxical impressions: 1. unlike most civilians, American leaders saw 9/11 coming years before it happened; and 2. barring a run of stupid luck, they had almost zero chance of stopping it, given the realities of the pre-9/11 world.
July 26, 2011
Staff Pick: The Real State of America Atlas 2
by Bill Morris
Where The Real State of America Atlas truly shines is in its demolition of the notion – the enduring fantasy – that America is a land of equal opportunity.