The New Republic

One of the great small pleasures of used books is the occasional marginalia of a previous owner. You learn a tiny bit about that anonymous soul by seeing the passages she underlined, or tidily double-underlined, or exclamation-pointed, or starred madly and messily. You begin to worry about the girl who found so much to mark in To The Lighthouse, or fall in love, a little bit, with the person who found all the funniest parts of Catch 22. READ MORE >>

The other day I picked up a copy of The Adventures of Augie March. I hadn’t remembered that Saul Bellow, writing in the early 1950s, when he was not yet forty, about Chicago in the 1920s, had been in full sympathy with the urban poor, as he definitely was not later in his career. READ MORE >>

Lamentations of the purported downfall of international news coverage have been plentiful in recent years, as American newspapers have slashed budgets and scaled back their global presence. READ MORE >>

I first met Paul Scott at Firpo’s bar on Chowringhee in Calcutta in 1944. READ MORE >>

Proprioception refers to the body’s sense of itself in space; or, more specifically, to a sense of its parts in relation to one another. READ MORE >>

Genre memoirs stink. I don’t mean the books themselves. Plenty of them do stink, surely, just like any other kind of book. But some of them are great. READ MORE >>

Americans tend to have three preoccupations about the recent past: the rights revolutions of the 1960s; Ronald Reagan, his conservative movement, and its legacy; and American-led globalization.1 Remarkably, to an American reader, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st C READ MORE >>

F Scott Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13. He died in Hollywood in 1940, a has-been at the age of 44. His young secretary at the time, Frances Kroll, writes in her memoir that when that final royalty statement came through from Scribner’s, “the handful of sales proved that the author, himself, was the only purchaser. He told me about it, laughing bitterly.” READ MORE >>

Back in the benighted old days of the DSM-III—the third iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the American Psychiatric Association’s official catalog of the mental illnesses—my therapy patients included a 26-year-old man who came to see me due to his wife’s complaint that he’d “gotten out of control of himself.” The attractive couple had recently been united for life in a grand ceremony in her hometown, followed by an even splashier party on the highest floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston. READ MORE >>

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 >>