Not Only in the Dark
Rachel Pastan on Marjorie Sandor's anthology of eerie writing.
All Reviews
A Drink (or Four) With Kent Russell
Jordan G. Teicher on Kent Russell's "I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son."
Love Lays Ghastly Traps for the Soul
“Love lays ghastly traps for the soul,” in Tremain’s engrossing tales, but her characters accept their unhappiness as the necessary antidote to meaninglessness.
Upbringing Is All
Daphne Merkin: “For people who have never had a childhood, being a grown-up isn’t where the glamour is.”
Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Fulton and Bachmann
Lisa Russ Spaar looks at second books of poetry by Beth Bachmann and Alice Fulton.
The Revolution Will Not Be Simplified
A great many rules were made in Communist Romania not to be followed so much as to create opportunities for failure and prosecution and to achieve a state of social paralysis, the populace rendered captive to its own nervous breakdown.
Finding Susan
Daniel Schreiber’s "Susan Sontag," the first biography published since her death, offers an opportunity to reassess how we approach the last great public intellectual.
Reading Nicholson Baker with J.C. Hallman
Reading, Hallman insists, is an exuberant, orgasmic relationship …
Ode to Animals
“Human beings are degrading ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history,” Deming writes.
Gronking Jesus
"The Lost Gospel by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson is not the worst book ever written...But is perhaps the worst book ever written about Jesus."
Notes on “Note-by-Note”: A New Molecular Cuisine?
You are what you think you are eating.
Rereading Thomas Pynchon: Postmodernism and the Political Real
Two collections of essays "offer overlapping reconsiderations of Pynchon’s oeuvre and its politics."
The Magic of the Invisible Middle Finger
Under classic imperialism and colonialism, metropolitan countries owned their colonies. Under globalization, they rent them.
Creativity Under Capitalism: The Pop Music Critic as Public Intellectual
Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics, is a much-needed example of the public intellectual unafraid of tapping into his academic voice (and persona).
“The Riverbank of Desolation”: An Evening with Hagiwara’s Translator
“Am I the butterfly in the dream or am I the one here now?”
Joining the Club: British Football’s Imaginary Global Community
David Goldblatt argues that as British football gains popularity around the world, its indigenous community and the game risk being compromised by investors and increased spectacle.