Book-giving serendipity
Last month I sent Darin Strauss a copy of Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori after he overpaid for his part of a cab ride home from a party. In return, he introduced me to the Essential Stories of V.S. Pritchett. And then, poking around online, he discovered that Pritchett (pictured) had once written an introduction to...
Heart-shaped bread-and-butter sandwiches
Fannie Farmer’s Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent and Robin Bellinger’s “Feed a Fever, Starve a Cold” inspired my latest New York Times Magazine mini-column.
Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) when you’re sic...
Life vs. the novel
At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner wonders “whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels.”
Sven Birkerts on loss and change
“Lost things have their own special category. So long as they’re lost, and felt to be lost, they belong to the imagination and live more vividly than before. They make a mystery.” — Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk. Birkerts’ best personal essays are steeped in an anxious nostalgia that is, in intensity if not in...
Exceeding your RDA of “um” and “I think”
I spoke with the Nervous Breakdown’s Brad Listi for an hour last month about writing, blogging, day jobs, personal stuff, and why I’m not reviewing nowadays. You can listen at Other People Podcast.
Junot Díaz doings
On the heels of news that Junot Díaz will have a new collection of stories out this fall, the Times reports that he wrote the introduction to the Library of America’s forthcoming reissue of the pulp novel Princess of Mars.
H.L. Mencken on insect terminology: U.S. v. U.K.
My latest New York Times Magazine columnlet draws on a passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (1921) about the word “bug.” “An Englishman,” he says, restricts its use “very rigidly to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American...
Talking with Ellen Ullman about By Blood
Ellen Ullman’s By Blood is a dark, brooding, and marvelous novel that doesn’t really resemble anything else, though disparate elements of it remind me of so many stories I love. The book combines a disturbing confessional intensity, as in Coetzee’s Disgrace, Lasdun’s Horned Man, and Tartt’s The Secret History, with a paranoid claustrophobia akin to...
James Wood on Santorum’s planet
I’m interested in James Wood’s writings on religion, including his novel, The Book Against God, which I read recently. Here he is on Santorum’s attitudes toward the environment. (See also.)
Reduced to the size of the proposal
“The most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself.” — Geoff Dyer
Edward St. Aubyn’s sole NYC appearance
Edward St. Aubyn, whose social comedy is “more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today,” appears Upstairs at the Square this Wednesday.
Cabbing it with Charles Dickens
My latest New York Times Magazine mini-column is on London’s taxi drivers, who memorize 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks to obtain a license; they emerge from the training with a larger hippocampus. In the smaller city of his day, Charles Dickens also mastered the city’s roads — to avoid being overcharged. But eventually, as he...
