Recent Articles
February 28, 2009
Curiosities: Bootleg Translations 1
by Editor
Rumors of John Cheever’s death? Greatly exaggerated. HarperCollins sets out to test the proposition that there really is no such thing as bad publicity. BHL rips Valkyrie and Tom Cruise. Maud lauds Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women. The New York Public Library names Millions guest contributor Sana Krasikov a finalist for [...]
February 27, 2009
The Millions Interview: Zoë Heller 0
by Edan Lepucki
Zoë Heller’s new novel, The Believers, is an enormously entertaining and sharply observed story about the Litvinoff family in New York City. When father Joel, a famous radical leftist lawyer, suffers from a stroke and falls into a coma, his wife Audrey and his two grown daughters, Rosa and Karla, find themselves wrestling with revelations [...]
February 26, 2009
Canon Fodder 1
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Spotted today under the arm of a student at a New York college: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. I’ve written here about the speed of this author’s induction into the pantheon. Nonetheless, it was remarkable – to me, anyway – to learn from this student that TSD had popped up on an English class syllabus. [...]
February 26, 2009
Appearing Elsewhere 0
by Kevin Hartnett
I ran a piece in last week’s New York Observer reviewing William Goetzmann’s intellectual history, Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism. A dry title, I know, and somewhat dry inside the cover, too. Goetzmann is near the end of a long academic career and the book felt a little [...]
February 26, 2009
Baseball Oasis: A Story of Chicago’s Winnemac Park 1
by C. Max Magee
I wrote the following piece in 2005 when I was in graduate school in Chicago. It was fun to research and write, but I never had the opportunity to do anything with it. However, with baseball season just around the corner, and this correspondent already getting excited, it seemed like a reasonable moment to dust [...]
February 25, 2009
Judging Books by Their Covers: America Vs. UK 7
by C. Max Magee
I’ve always thought that British book covers, generally speaking, are nicer looking than their American counterparts, with the latter seeking to target a demographic rather than to dazzle the eye. With this in mind, the following is an incredibly unscientific experiment in aesthetics. I’ve taken as a sample the Tournament of Books contenders whose American [...]