In Memoriam
February 4, 2010
On Rereading J.D. Salinger 1
by Anne K. Yoder
It occurs to me that I’m judging Holden more like an old friend than a character in a novel. This is perhaps the largest compliment I can pay him, and Salinger, too.
January 28, 2010
J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010 13
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Though it has been talked about as the greatest vanishing act in the history of American letters, Jerome David Salinger’s career also turns out to be one of the major triumphs.
November 9, 2009
Claude Levi-Strauss, 1908-2009 2
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Levi-Strauss’ most important ideas would become so ubiquitous that you probably already know them, even if you don’t know you know.
October 11, 2009
Requiescat in pace, TriQuarterly 1
by Garth Risk Hallberg
TriQuarterly, the long-running trail-blazing literary journal more or less dreamed into existence by the late Charles Newman, is apparently no more, due to budget cuts at Northwestern University. Newman’s foreword to his first issue as editor, reprinted at A Public Space, should be required reading for anyone thinking about the purpose and future of the [...]
September 14, 2009
Jim Carroll, 1950 – 2009 4
by Garth Risk Hallberg
in the subculture of which Jim Carroll was a sort of poet laureate – one of them, anyway – the movie of The Basketball Diaries registers only as a minor souvenir.
July 7, 2009
Vasily Aksyonov, Giant of Russian Literature, Dies at 76 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
It would be a shame if the death of the Russian novelist Vasily Aksyonov yesterday got lost in the welter of cultural losses that surrounds it. Aksyonov is one of the towering literary figures of the postwar era – one who might have been more widely recognized as such were it not for the strictures [...]