First came the smoky streets, then the deserted ones. So much about the past few days has felt like a particularly twisted action movie—fire, explosions, injured and discombobulated people running helter-skelter—but certain images coming from Boston and its suburbs in the past 24 hours have seemed more like stills from a post-apocalyptic film than anything else—the kind where emptiness is eerie, and anything but peaceful. READ MORE >>
Not Quite Stories—Alice Munro’s Almost Autobiography
LAST WEEK, Salon reported that Philip Roth is retiring from writing fiction by translating an interview from a French magazine. Roth’s publisher confirmed the author’s statement, but if they had not, it would not have been the first time that an author sighed loudly, expressed ennui, and led his attentive fans astray. READ MORE >>
Why Nobel Prize Oddsmakers are Usually So Wrong
Maybe it’s the season. (Polls! Polls! Polls!) But even in off-cycle political years, pre-award discussion often revolves around the supposed front-runner. READ MORE >>
The New Haunted House
Welcome, Cassandra!
Over the past several months, there has been a biting back and forth over the New York Public Library’s planned renovation (the so-called Central Library Plan or CLP), which would close two midtown circulating libraries, open a circulating library within the main research library on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, and move several million books off-site to make way for new facilities. READ MORE >>
In Defense of Girly Book Covers
The Kase Against K: How the Kardashians Are Ruining the Letter
About 10 years ago, something terrible happened: Strangers began to get comfortable with my first name. READ MORE >>
