Books
American fiction has a work problem. Blame it on an MFA system that shunts wannabe writers into the academy before they have time to scuff their sneakers in a break room or callous their hands on a broom handle. Blame it on an overwhelming literary consensus that there’s something sullying about implicating oneself in capitalism, even if it’s to document it. Or blame it on a conviction, among readers and writers alike, that the workaday world is plain old boring. READ MORE >>
Print journalism was once a reliable career path for the heroines of so-called chick lit. READ MORE >>
My favorite two sentences in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature are: “Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its twelve steps are but suggestions.” When a drunk at the end of his tether, Bill Wilson, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1930s—a spiritual program based on meeting with other addicts—there was a fundamental humility to his ideology: It might work for some. READ MORE >>
Sound Check: W.S. Merwin’s Love of Foreign Language
In the world of letters, there’s prolific and there’s W.S. Merwin. The former Poet Laureate has written twenty-six books of poetry in the last six decades and has still found the time to translate twenty-two books of other people’s poems. The translations are so voluminous, and the source languages so varied—from Japanese to Swedish, from Sanskrit to Crow—that you would expect a selection of his translations to be an opus of world literature, a small window into a pre-Babel world. READ MORE >>
Fed Head—An Insider’s Take on the Financial Crisis
Say this for Alan S. Blinder: the man has not been jaded. His new book on the Wall Street meltdown, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, is animated by a lay person’s sense of wonder and—at times—horror at the country’s financial mess. READ MORE >>
Field of Schemes—How Politics Infected Sports
After the Spring—Post-Revolution Hezbollah
Is Friendship Better than Romance?
LAST MONTH, I went on a very successful “friend date.” We had a few acquaintances in common and had talked briefly at parties. I had a hunch about her, that there was a future for us, and so I asked her out. We met at a mutually convenient bar, summarized our pasts in that frantic, practiced way that people do—skipping the boring parts, dramatizing events that end with punch lines. We were recklessly candid and very smiley. I walked home, ecstatic, and told my boyfriend all about it. READ MORE >>
Disturbia—Will Self’s Experiment
INCREASINGLY, ARTISTS OF all stripes are expected not only to create original work but also to provide some explanation of their intentions. Consumers, especially of art that is not straightforward, want proof that it hasn’t been created merely to confound or bamboozle them. Artists want to stave off accusations of obscurity, pointlessness, and technical incompetence (“My kid could do that!”) by situating their work within a larger context. READ MORE >>
