Top Book Blogs
Journalist named to John Edwards's witness list; author Kyle MacDonald repurposes someone else's book, offers for sale on Etsy...
(May 17, 2012)
Rebecca Stead chose to set her children's novel "When You Reach Me"—winner of the 2010 Newbery Medal—in nineteen-seventies New York partly because that's where she grew up, but also, as she told one interviewer, because she wanted "to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy." Her
(May 17, 2012)
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Tarek Eltayeb's The Palm House, just out in English from American University in Cairo Press.
(May 17, 2012)
A new issue of the Asia Literary Review is up, entirely devoted to Korea; currently, all the content is freely accessible online, but apparently not for long, so check it out soon. Among the offerings: Charles
(May 17, 2012)
In the new issue of The Nation -- the Spring Books issue -- Holly Case writes at some length on Blind Spot: On Christa Wolf. A few Wolf titles are under review at the complete review, including the
(May 17, 2012)
A California-based software developer mapped the many places mentioned in W. G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn."
(May 17, 2012)
A droll diagram mapping the tumultuous birth of a book. Related posts: Dovlatov in PEN It appears that our own Sonya Chung’s consideration of underappreciated... Titular Oddities The shortlist for the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book... The Fall of the House of Medill Megan McKinney’s
(May 17, 2012)
The U.S. research university as a global model
(May 17, 2012)
Rebecca Davis O’Brien unearths a letter in which Malcolm Cowley tackles the timeless question, “Should I get an MFA?” Just as poignant as Cowley’s letter is novelist Helen DeWitt’s pointed dismissal of Cowley’s advice in the comments section. Related posts: Advice
(May 17, 2012)
The author of "Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes" shares the books she loved most when she was young.
(May 17, 2012)
The latest issues of Barrelhouse and Big Bridge are online, free, and ready for your perusal. No related posts.
(May 17, 2012)
Ideally, the critic in any art form evaluates a work based on the quality of its content alone. Realistically, this is almost never the case; personal prejudices and the sociopolitical atmosphere easily work their way into reviews. The pitfall the critic must avoid is letting such concerns dominate
(May 17, 2012)
Pulitzer-prize winning book critic Michael Dirda joined Reddit and invited the internet to ask him anything; among the highlights—the worst book he’s ever read, an allusion to scoring crack for Hunter S. Thompson, and a picture of Dirda’s cat. Related posts: Hunter S. Thompson’s
(May 17, 2012)
Can it still achieve its original ambitions?
(May 17, 2012)
Could geeking out over a mutually beloved novel surpass even alcohol as the ultimate social ice-breaker? In my three months of solo travel in India, shared literary interests have opened the doors to several new friendships. Quite like the bond formed between travelers on similar journeys, the bond
(May 17, 2012)
The New Yorker announced that their literary blog, The Book Bench, will henceforth be called Page-Turner. The name change signals a “building on the work of the Book Bench blog, and expanding on it.” In an inaugural post, Ryan Bloom translates the deceptively simple first line of
(May 17, 2012)
The bicentenaries of three great Victorian writers underline the capricious nature of literary afterlivesWhat are the qualities that make a writer endure and flourish? It's an intriguing question whose answer includes luck, good timing and the mysterious workings of the zeitgeist. Take 2012. This
(May 17, 2012)
Psychiatric diagnosis is too important to be left exclusively in the hands of psychiatrists
(May 17, 2012)
It was a strange coincidence. The day I finished reading Amber Dermont’s The Starboard Sea, a novel that deals in part with hazing/bullying at an elite prep school, the revelation of Mitt Romney’s hazing/bullying episode at an elite prep school came to light. It cast episodes of the
(May 17, 2012)
So, it’s come to this: Court Orders Amazon.com To Adopt Bankrupt Bookstores’ Cats Most Painful Pun of the week: ”… a Sentence to Write Sentences: When former pharmaceutical executive Andrew G. Bodnar pleaded guilty to white-collar crime in 2009, the judge didn’t
(May 17, 2012)
I had never heard of singer/songwriter Josh Ritter, but I was moved to find out about him because his debut novel, Bright’s Passage, received very positive notices. Additionally, I was curious because of the diverse backgrounds of the people (Thomas Ricks, Jesse Kornbluth, Dennis Lehane, and
(May 17, 2012)
Robert Caro is now on Twitter; Michael Dirda names Judith Krantz's Dazzle as the worst book he's ever read; A new study from Harvard Business School finds that Amazon reviews are as likely to reflect a book's critical reception as professional newspapers.
(May 17, 2012)
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Pingali Suranna's sixteenth-century Telugu novel, The Sound of the Kiss, or The Story That Must Never Be Told (which isn't even the first Suranna title under review at the complete review).
(May 16, 2012)
The International Writers Festival in Jerusalem opened 13 May and runs through the 18th; it features what looks like pretty much every Israeli writer of any note, as well as foreign authors such as Arnon Grunberg, Krasznahorkai László, Jo
(May 16, 2012)
Late in John Irving's 13th novel, "In One Person," the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It's the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period.
(May 16, 2012)
The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality
(May 16, 2012)
At the Guardian Book Blog, Anthony Horowitz wonders “who’s helping who in the cover blurb game.” We of course recommend pairing his article with Alan Levinovitz’s Brief History of Blurbs from last year. No related posts.
(May 16, 2012)
The author of "Bunch of Amateurs" on the rebellious spirit of American innovators.
(May 16, 2012)
Chinua Achebe, best known for his novel Things Fall Apart, is working on a memoir to be titled There Was a Country. Related posts: New Joan Didion Memoir Joan Didion has finished work on a new memoir about... How to Pitch Your Addiction Memoir A writer pitches an addiction, and a subsequent
(May 16, 2012)
Capitalism is predicated on bad behavior — this should hardly be news
(May 16, 2012)
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