In Memoriam
August 5, 2008
Holding a Vigil for a People’s History: an Appreciation of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward 1
by Stephanie Deutsch
Stephanie Deutsch, a writer and critic living in Washington, D.C., was a first year graduate student in Soviet Union Area Studies at Harvard in 1970 when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. She had spent the previous year living in Moscow. This essay is an update of an appreciation written ten years [...]
November 10, 2007
So Long, Sweet Scientist: Norman Mailer Dies at 84 5
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Norman Mailer, a colossus who bestrode worlds both literary and journalistic – and, at his best, combined them – has died of acute renal failure, according to the Times. Mailer had been in poor health for some time, and, given his hospitalization last month and his advanced age, his death comes as no surprise. And [...]
September 4, 2007
Remembering Michael Jackson, 65, author, beer critic 1
by Ben Dooley
In the early 1970s, when Michael Jackson first came on the scene, the idea of a professional beer critic must have seemed absurd. You didn’t need a professional, after all, to help you choose between one pale, fizzy lager and another. They all got you equally drunk. Since that time, beer culture in the United [...]
August 23, 2007
A Salute to Grace Paley (1922-2007) 3
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Thumbtacked to the wall above my desk is a line from Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. It runs: “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” Paley could speak of “open destiny” with some authority. A writer to the marrow, she was also a mother, a rabble-rouser, and an inspiration. [...]
April 25, 2007
Halberstam’s Heroes 0
by Noah Deutsch
Not having really read anything that David Halberstam wrote, I cannot write a good-faith eulogy of the man, nor engage in anything deeper than a surface discussion of his books. But because what I have read about Halberstam has painted him as a great journalistic voice of 20th century America, and because I have recently [...]
April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut RIP 5
by C. Max Magee
Awoke to the news that Kurt Vonnegut died. His death was somewhat unexpected, coming after a fall at his home in New York, but he lived a full life, even penning a surprise bestseller that put him back in the public eye in 2005. That was fun to see because, though Vonnegut may be one [...]
