Recent Articles
July 9, 2009
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Designing a Book Jacket…” 8
by Sonya Chung
Sonya Chung is a freelance writer and creative writing teacher who nourishes her split personality by living part-time in the S. Bronx and part-time in rural PA. She writes and grows vegetables in both places. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, BOMB Magazine, and Sonora Review, among others. Her first novel, [...]
July 8, 2009
Appearing Elsewhere 1
by C. Max Magee
Pete Dexter has been in the news around here lately, and keeping that ball rolling, I’ve contributed a piece to The Rumpus series “The Last Book I Loved” about Dexter’s collection of columns, Paper Trails. Technically, it’s not the last book I’ve loved (more recently there’s been Waiting for the Barbarians, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, [...]
July 8, 2009
Middlesex on the Tube 2
by Lydia Kiesling
I just discovered that HBO is going to turn Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex into a series. Immediately all was untrammeled rapture. I love Middlesex, and I am a big fan of HBO series generally. The Sopranos. The inimitable Wire. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Rome. Deadwood. And yes, Sex and the City. I know that Sex and [...]
July 7, 2009
Appearing Elsewhere 1
by Garth Risk Hallberg
In my most recent “Year in Reading” post, I mentioned Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men, a 1200-page novel it took me six weeks to consume and six months to digest. A somewhat longer, though still woefully inadequate, consideration appears today at The Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog, as part of “Postmodernism Month.” If you [...]
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 [...]
July 6, 2009
Reader Beware 1
by C. Max Magee
Advance readers copies, the paperbacks sent out early to book reviewers, often contain special notes from authors or editors that impart a little back story or extol the virtues of the book at hand, but I’ve never seen an author’s note quite like the one that Pete Dexter penned for the advance readers copies of [...]