The Time Bryan O’Nolan Met Mike Pence at a Foreign Policy Event
When Mike Pence turned to shake my hand Saturday morning in New Hampshire, one of the most absurd events in my life began to unfold.
Category: Books
Sunday Morning! “Another Country” by James Baldwin
In what feels like four novels in one, James Baldwin covers everything he knows about how internalized social opprobrium can warp our capacity to love. It’s… a lot.
Sunday Morning! A Tale of Two Novels
A recent book on the art world did not exactly rock mine. But “Leaving Brooklyn” from 1989- that’s the one you’ve gotta read.
The Boundaries and Conduits of Writing and Publishing
The human condition includes the need to be heard, and for many of us who can type, writing is one channel to speak that need.
Christmas Morning! “The Tenants of Moonbloom” by Edward Lewis Wallant
A rollicking posthumous novel with a very Jewish punchline for its parable: Yes, everyone is kind of a schmuck. But we’re required to love them anyway. And isn’t that funny?
Sunday Morning! “The Door” by Magda Szabó
They always judge you. On Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s haunting novel about a housekeeper who loves and persecutes her employer in equal measure.
Sunday Morning! “Tinkers” by Paul Harding
Taking time for Paul Harding’s Pulitzer winning first novel about a clock repairman and horologist for whom time is quickly running out.
Sunday Morning! “Rat Bohemia” by Sarah Schulman
This 1995 novel by Sarah Schulman is a good reminder of a time when people moved to cities like New York because they weren’t welcome at home.
Sunday Morning! Leonora Carrington, the Complete Stories
Like fairy tales for mad children, the stories of Leonora Carrington are as packed with strangeness and complete imaginative freedom as her paintings.
Sunday Morning! “The Monkey’s Wrench” by Primo Levi
Primo Levi is best remembered as one of the great novelists of the Holocaust; he was one of the few Italian Jews sent to Auschwitz who survived, and he wrote about it
Monday! (Sunday Part Two) “Music is Over!” by Ben Arzate
In an era of boring mass media, we need creative weirdness more than ever. “Music is Over!” gets weird. But weird is probably what we most need right now.
On The Satanic Verses
There are a handful of verses in the Koran and also a book by Salman Rushdie called “The Satanic Verses”. I want to talk about both.
Sunday Morning! “Modern Love” by Constance DeJong
A recovered Constance DeJong novel from late 70s NYC that overflows its banks and exhausts all possibilities without exhausting the reader like many experimental novels do.
Book Burning
“Desktop covid dividers and a refrigerator was “to be recycled.” But the five books deemed inappropriate were “to be destroyed.”
Sunday Morning! “Berg” by Ann Quin
Berg seems to go through a crisis of his own. Does he really want to kill this stranger? Or does he want to seduce the man’s mistress?
Sunday Morning! “Rudin” by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev’s first novel tells of a common type: the brilliant intellectual who could have changed the world, if only he’d get out of his own way.
Sunday Morning! “This is Memorial Device” by David Keenan
Because, like all great books on music, David Keenan is really writing about us, nudging us in the ribs, and saying Hey, do you remember…
Sunday Morning! “The Gospel Singer” by Harry Crews
It’s hard to write about the South. Harry Crews’s first novel took a tone somewhere between the Grand Guignol and the Grand Ole’ Opry.
Sunday Morning! “Butcher’s Crossing” by John Williams
In John Williams great work of Western Noir, the one-big-heist goes wrong and flawed men become most fully themselves in failure, like all of us
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