‘The Abundance’ offers opportunity to reflect on Annie Dillard’s writing
"What kind of book is this?" Annie Dillard asked 42 years ago in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." It's in the spirit of the questions Thoreau asks in the book to...
All Stories
Great writers make great films — or even bad films — more enjoyable
My favorite sentences written about the cinema are from Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" (1961): Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives .... What I remember...
‘Real Life Rock’ and an appreciation of rock critic Greil Marcus
A book about punk rock changed my life when I was 19. It was actually about much more than punk, or punk was about much more than I'd suspected. I...
Chinese Cultural Revolution recalled in memoir ‘The Cowshed’
In 1966, in maybe the weirdest solution to a power struggle ever conceived by a head of state, Mao Zedong more or less turned the state over to high-school and...
‘Red Rosa’ draws portrait of Rosa Luxemburg
She was born Rozalia Luksenburg in Poland in 1871. Against the triple historical whammy of being "a girl, a Jew, a cripple," as Vivian Gornick put it, she opposed an...
New poetry imprint Commune Editions issues notable works
"This is a great poem. We think we can say that. It is innovative and experimental for those who like that. It is 'political' for those who like that. And...
Reissues of classic chillers fit for holiday giving
I've loved to be spooked by stories since I was 5, when I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House in the Big Woods." This is not generally considered a horror...
‘The Givenness of Things’ proves Marilynne Robinson’s essay greatness
I recently read yet another of those clueless articles whose gist is that religious people aren't completely stupid or insane. This finding is generally conveyed with a sense of chastened...
Review: ‘Submission’ by Michel Houellebecq
At the beginning of J.K. Huysmans' 1884 novel "Against Nature," the neurotic aesthete Jean Des Esseintes must leave the Jesuit college where he has found the only true happiness he...
Review: ‘Nein. A Manifesto’ by Eric Jarosinski
"Be positive!" is an obviously vacuous imperative, but it is also sinister insofar as it masks a barbarous social reality. What to affirm first? Obscene economic inequality? Ecological devastation? Mass...