Reviews
August 29, 2011
Accidents of Geography: Evan Hughes’ Literary Brooklyn 2
by Michael Bourne
Despite some deft writing and a G train full of literary gossip, the best that can be said for Literary Brooklyn is that it makes no grand promises that it can’t keep.
August 24, 2011
Living Out the Day: The Moviegoer Turns Fifty 15
by Jim Santel
Catch-22 had been important to me as a student of literature, and Revolutionary Road had been important to my early development as a writer. But The Moviegoer was important to me as a human being. Like few other books I’ve ever read, it changed me.
August 22, 2011
The Canon Guard: Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence 23
by Matt Hanson
Harold Bloom is not so much the judicious patriarch or brazen egomaniac as he is a grandmother – endlessly harried, fiercely loving, and relentlessly worried about the future of his brood.
August 19, 2011
A Morality Play Where the Moral Keeps Changing: Notes on the Library of America’s At the Fights 3
by Rodney Welch
It’s hard to love the sport without being, also, deeply aware of what a bestial exhibition it is. It’s uncivilized, dirty, corrupt, and ought to be against the law. It’s a racket that refuses to be rehabilitated, and a volatile, exhilarating vice.
August 17, 2011
Vive la Revolution! Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory 0
by Matt McGregor
Our Marxian tradition always returns to this basic assumption: that when societies are overturned, we who are formed in society are overturned as well. In Tyrant Memory, Moya’s counter-lesson becomes apparent: wherever heights are found in the glory of revolutionary action, they do not last. There is no permanent revolution.
August 12, 2011
I Could Show You Memories To Rival Berlin in the Thirties: Christopher Isherwood and The Berlin Stories 3
by Matthew Gallaway
To understand Isherwood is to understand his infatuation with liars, which I think makes it reasonable to ask whether he himself was lying, or at least half-lying in a way he could find almost believable. But exactly what is he lying about and why do we as readers long to be taken in?
