Every age gets the publishing industry it deserves, whether it’s Babylonian scribes etching the Epic of Gilgamesh into stone tablets, medieval scribes toiling away at illuminated manuscripts or Maxwell Perkins laboring over the sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. READ MORE >>
Reading a play by a great novelist is sort of like listening to Marilyn Manson plow through the Great American Songbook: You thrill at the prospect of colossal failure while also secretly hoping to be surprised. READ MORE >>
Are you as stressed out as I am? I only ask because, frankly, you look a little stressed. It must be the job. Or maybe the marriage. I mean, there’s so much to be stressed out about. Just look at the newspaper. Look at your bank account. Is your blood pressure rising yet? Well, you need yoga. No, wait, you need a drink. You need to relax. Because, with the way things are going, this stress is going to kill you. READ MORE >>
Back in 2008, the British writer Jim Crace announced that he would retire from fiction in three years’ time, fearing the fate of the elderly novelist who is “no longer fashionable and can only find a marginal publisher and command a tiny advance.” Leaving aside the melancholy truth that plenty of writers must make do with trifling advances from small publishers, one has to take Crace at his word. READ MORE >>
Only A Bit of Hell
Promotions
IT CERTAINLY SAYS something about our civilization—and probably nothing good—that many of us have a favorite commercial, whether it is “Where’s the beef?” or “Think different.” It says something else that one of our most beloved television shows is about the moment in history when advertising became a cultural force of its own. I don’t think these phenomena are unrelated. READ MORE >>
Something Brewing
TO DECRY THE decline of America is to know nothing about beer. No nation in its twilight can shine with such Yakima Glory (Victory Brewing Co., Downington, Pa). The doomsayers who say that all empires must fall forget that we are secure in the grip of the Backwoods Bastard (Founders, Grand Rapids, Mich.). You, reader, may find solace in Cato’s lament of Rome’s fall, but I’ll cast my own lot with Pliny the Elder (Russian River Brewing, Calif.). READ MORE >>
Unbearable
AN ENTIRELY OUTLANDISH thought struck me as I read this book: it might have been written by a bear. The thought arose after perhaps the tenth mention of how the Church had made the bear “into a figure of ridicule,” removing this creature so admired by Northern Europeans as the primary symbol of Christ’s nobility. The notion stayed with me through a discussion of the teddy bear’s advent, which is one of the author’s few acknowledgements that history did not stop in the High Middle Ages. READ MORE >>
Waterworld
THE MOST UNFORTUNATE feature of John Mack’s new book is its subtitle. I can only hope that “A Cultural History” was the work of an editorial assistant who feared that Mack’s effort would be sequestered on a shelf of academic or scientific tomes unless some popular tag were attached. Since cultural histories are all the rage, Mack’s book at least has a fighting chance of sharing a display with the most recent profundities of David Brooks. READ MORE >>
