Books
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Books Foreign Arts Reading Alone in Berlin in Berlin
Posted by Jerome Ludwig on 01.20.13 at 09:00 AM
I do have friends there. And I was happy to have a new Fallada novel, having been in thrall of his writing since I first read his brilliant and devastating autobiographical novel The Drinker, which was composed by Fallada while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum. It haunted my dreams.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Broken Books Arts Lunch in the winter garden with James Joyce
Posted by Tony Adler on 01.09.13 at 04:56 PM
The office kids are together. They take turns ordering. The short, fair one steps up to the cashier and tells her what he wants. I put him at mid- to late 20s, like my own sons.
The cashier asks him his name. He gives it. Vecchio, I think. The cashier says, "Ah! Italiano!" and starts using her Italian accent on him. One of Vecchio's friends says, "I never knew you were Italian. I always thought you were Jewish."
"Because I'm cheap," Vecchio replies, and laughs.
"Yeah," says the friend, who doesn't seem to get the joke but gives short heh anyway.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Books Arts Poetry Roses r red, violets r blu/Poetry's honchos r bidding adieu
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on 01.07.13 at 12:29 PM
Is off to Yale
After a decade
At Poetry
As editor,
He couldn't fail:
Circulation
Up times three.
With Lilly cash
He made it pretty
Ran more prose
For every ditty
Two national prizes
Were his reward,
And now he rises—
Could he have been bored
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Books Arts Women's Issues Are modern women losing themselves?
Posted by Sarah Nardi on 01.06.13 at 09:00 AM
As far as I can glean from her posts, this would-be actress and bon vivant lives somewhere in the hinterlands of suburban LA and has no interests beyond her children. Her Facebook presence is an endless procession of images from Christmas pageants, trick-or-treating, and family vacations unfailingly spent on the beach. Gone are the diatribes on the superiority of French viticulture and vows to appear on screen before age 25. In their place are reports of the most recent tooth lost and an adorable request that the pool be filled with pudding. By all appearances, she is living an ideal upper-middle-class life in sunny southern California. Still, I can't help but look at her and think that she sacrificed herself along the way—that in essence, she failed.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Books Arts Year in Review Film Thomas Mann, film critic
Posted by Ben Sachs on 12.28.12 at 01:38 PM
I look forward to revisiting this and to seeing what different critical responses emerge over the years. In the meantime, I'll let Thomas Mann have the final word; following the jump is a relevant quote from his story "A Man and His Dog":
Friday, December 21, 2012
Books Arts Politics News A little good news: The Chicago Area Ethnic Handbook
Posted by Ben Joravsky on 12.21.12 at 10:30 AM
So, some good news . . .
Jeryl Levin and Cynthia Linton have come out with the second edition of The Chicago Area Ethnic Handbook, which, as it sounds, is a book dedicated to the notion that we can and should have a little better understanding of the people who live around us.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Books Arts Dalkey Archive Press's infamous ad, the "Worst Job Posting Ever," was satire, sort of
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on 12.18.12 at 04:28 PM
That was a decade ago. Since then Dalkey—which started in Elmwood Park and is now based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—has opened outposts in the ostensibly more literature-friendly confines of London and Dublin. A quirky, donor-supported nonprofit, it publishes about 50 books a year, mostly what O'Brien has described as "subversive" (read "experimental") fiction, about half of them translations.
It's been famous in a fairly narrow niche.
Until last week, when O'Brien posted an ad on the Dalkey website for a couple London-based interns. O'Brien made it clear that he's looking only for candidates who "do not have any other commitments (personal or professional)" and "will do whatever is required of them to make the press succeed."
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Behind Our Scenes Books Arts Reader fiction, past and future
Posted by Jerome Ludwig on 12.15.12 at 10:00 AM
With our annual Pure Fiction Issue upcoming, I thought it would be an opportune time to go back through the Reader's Pure Fiction archives and revisit some personal favorites. Enterprising publishers take note: these have yet to be compiled into a book.
12/28/2000
"West Side Lullaby" by Jack Clark (More on Clark, the original cabdriver-writer.)
"Moving Day" by Philip Montoro (Montoro is currently the Reader's music editor; he also writes a lot about beer.)
"Hole" by Gina Frangello (Frangello is the executive editor of Other Voices Books and author of Slut Lullabies.)
"Credit and Agency" by Zoe Zolbrod (Zolbrod is the author of the novel Currency.)
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Behind Our Scenes Books Arts Jack Clark, the original cabdriver-writer
Posted by Jerome Ludwig on 12.09.12 at 10:00 AM
Clark started writing for the Reader in 1975 and "served a brief stint on the staff, during which he developed an aversion to deadlines," Deanna Isaacs wrote in "A Cabbie's Tale" in the Reader in July 2010.
The story goes on:
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Books Arts Film Yak, yak, yak—whack! On Killing Them Softly's source novel
Posted by J.R. Jones on 12.04.12 at 04:06 PM
