Rake's Progress (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Good stuff from Dan Green, as usual. Among those American writers who were originally identified as "minimalists," a group that would include Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, Mary Robison may have been the most minimalist...
The Reading Experience (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
Among those American writers who were originally identified as "minimalists," a group that would include Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, Mary Robison may have been the most minimalist of them all--or, to use the word...
2 Blowhards (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
Donald Pittenger writes: Dear Blowhards -- Edward Craig, back in Michigan after bravely braving San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore and living to report his findings here, now unearths for us a surprising nugget of ... well, let him report: * * * * * Michael Blowhard often lamented on this site about the lack of appreciation for the writing skills of popular novelists. These novelists often share...
Worn Fashion Journal (Free subscription) | 08/14/2009
“Nancy Drew is as immaculate and self-possessed as a Miss America on tour. She is as cool as a Mata Hari and as sweet as Betty Crocker.” - Bobbie Ann Mason On a steaming hot Monday in Toronto’s High Park, a bunch of Wornettes and friends got together to pay tribute to 3 notorious girls [...]
MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 07/27/2009
In lengthy, punchy critique of Amazon.com, Inc.'s Kindle 2, novelist and passionate print defender Nicholson Baker takes a literary look at the future of reading. His essay analyzes everything from the Kindle shipping box ("I'd entered some nesting Italo Calvino folktale world of packaging") to a history of the Vizplex "microspheres" underneath the screen. Nevertheless, the most...
The Phil Nugent Experience (Free subscription) | 07/13/2009
Mary Robison's One D.O.A., One on the Way is the best work of art about New Orleans and Katrina that I've come across, and my favorite new novel in many a moon. I was a fan of Robison's back in the '80s, after I came across her first novel Oh and her short stories, but she slipped off my radar in the '90s; it's only recently that I found out that she was battling writer's block during that time and...
英文人行道 et cetera, et cetera (Free subscription) | 06/01/2009
The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton THERE are certain things New York’s drinking sophisticates expect everyone — including tourists — to know. Can’t tell a malbec from a shiraz? You’re a bozo. Indifferent when facing a choice of Bud Light or Bass? What a dolt. Can’t distinguish Johnnie Walker from a single-malt scotch? Such a choob (that’s Scottish slang...
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