Page2RRS

• 08 Feb ' 16:49

  The heart of Englishness

  

  19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, a special issue on the Victorian East End. From Neo-Victorian Studies, a special issue on Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism, including Christine Ferguson (Glasgow): Surface Tensions: Steampunk, Subculture, and the Ideology of Style. England’s booze culture: Binge drinking used to be the height of fashion. The heart of Englishness: A review of The Gentry: Stories of the English by Adam Nicolson. Whose Englishness

  • 

  

  Zadie Smith reads from On Beauty

  • 
    Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History by Carmela Ciuraru

    George Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Claire Morgan, and others are profiled and analyzed in Carmela Ciuraru's entertaining new biographical study of writers who used pseudonyms.
  • 
    The Broken Word by Adam Foulds

    The Broken Word is a delicate and powerful poetic sequence that charts a young man's progress through a dark period in British colonial history—the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya.
  • 
    Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff

    The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it's here; it's everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it?

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 08 Feb ' 11:08

  The story in their own words

  

  

  From Utopian Studies, a special issue on crafting and craftivism. From Surveillance and Society, Matthew P. Tiessen (Ryerson): Being Watched Watching Watchers Watch: Determining the Digitized Future While Profitably Modulating Preemption (at the Airport); and Daniel Trottier (Alberta): Mutual Transparency or Mundane Transgressions? Institutional Creeping on Facebook. To be fair, he is a journalist: A short response to Chris Hedges on the Black Bloc. A Congo gold scam involving several American

  03/07

  Nathan Englander — What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories

  • 

  

  Mildred Pierce: The HBO Miniseries

  • 
    Happy John Ashbery Day

    If you live in New York City—or anywhere, really—today, April 7, is John Ashbery Day. And while this does not mean that we get the day off from work, we nonetheless have been searching for ways to pay homage to the great poet. Here's a good start: A video of Ashbery giving a nimble reading of his poem "Interesting People of Newfoundland." "Doc Hanks, the sawbones, was a real good surgeon / when he wasn't completely drunk, which was most of the time. / When only half drunk he could perform decent cranial surgery."
  • 
    An Interview with Chris Kraus

    Artist and author Chris Kraus talks with Martin Rumsby about film and capitalism ("Capitalism thrives on narrative"), as well as her film Gravity & Grace, her "ticket out of the ghetto of the experimental film world."
  • 
    Aimee Bender

    Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, discusses the Art of the Short Story as part of the Authors@Google series.

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 08 Feb ' 06:07

  The wonders of evolution

  

  Cameron Smith and Julia Ruppell (Portland State): What Anthropologists Should Know About the New Evolutionary Synthesis. The introduction (by Michael Ruse) to The Origin Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the Origin of Species by David N. Reznick. From The New Atlantis, Stephen L. Talbott on evolution and the illusion of randomness. Lamarck ascending: A review of Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology. Christie Wilcox on evolution and the rise of complexity

  New York magazine has named author Kathryn Schulz as their new book critic, filling a position that opened more than a year ago when Sam Anderson left for the New York Times Magazine. Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, and, apparently not to any professional detriment, refers to herself as the world’s “leading wrongologist.”

  Katherine Boo’s highly anticipated and already highly praised account of “life

  • 

  

  An Interview with David Shields

  • 
    Colson Whitehead on Sag Harbor

    Colson Whitehead, a self-proclaimed "child of the '80s," strolls through Sag Harbor, the Long Island town that served as the setting for his autobiographical novel of the same name. "I never liked The Catcher in the Rye. I feel like if you'd just give him some Prozac or an Xbox it would have been a much shorter book."
  • 
    An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

    A classic 1950s CBC television interview with Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discussing Lolita: "We can't trust a creative writer to say what he has done."
  • 
    Lineage: American Poetry Since 1950

    Elizabeth Alexander, Stephen Burt, Tony Hoagland, James Longenbach, Maureen McLane, and Susan Stewart assess post-War trends and achievements in American poetry using the National Book Award as a point of departure. Moderated by Katie Peterson, with an introduction by Robert Polito.

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 08 Feb ' 01:11

  The World of Charles Dickens, Complete With Pizza Hut

  Sam Anderson

  Five years ago, I flew to England to see the grand opening of something improbable: an attraction called Dickens World. It promised to be an "authentic" re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens's novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps,

  • 

  

  Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace

  • 
    Frank O'Hara reads "Having a Coke with You"

    Frank O'Hara gives a spirited reading of his poem celebrating New York City, love, and art. "I look / at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world / except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick."
  • 
    The Artist's Life: John Yau

    Poet, critic, and arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail John Yau talks about becoming a poet, his upbringing, and writing about art.
  • 
    Zadie Smith reads from On Beauty

    "Is it Plath? That's wrong, isn't it?' 'It's Shakespeare,' said Christian, wincing slightly. 'Tempest." Zadie Smith revisits a humorous and awkward scene from her campus novel, On Beauty

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 07 Feb ' 20:07

  • 

  

  Colson Whitehead on Sag Harbor

  • 
    Fear the Boom and Bust

    In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there's a "boom and bust" cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it.
  • 
    An interview with Dinaw Mengestu

    Dinaw Mengestu, recently named one of the "20 under 40" by the New Yorker, discusses his latest novel How to Read the Air.
  • 
    Mary Gaitskill reads "Lost Cat"

    Mary Gaitskill dwells on love and pain, humans and pets, in this story about a stray cat. "Many people, perhaps most, would consider my feelings neurotic, a projection onto an animal of my own loneliness and fear."

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 07 Feb ' 15:51

  What is Europe?

  

  Susanne Lechner and Renate Ohr (Goettingen): The Right of Withdrawal in the Treaty of Lisbon: A Game Theoretic Reflection on Different Decision Processes in the EU. Ionel Cioara (Oradea): Lisbon: The End of Utopia? From the Romanian Journal of European Affairs, Andras Inotai (IWE): Remarks on the Future of the European Union: Domestic and Global Challenges Ahead; and an article on strategic thinking in the EU: Aspiration or reality? Felix Roth (CEPS), Lars Jonung (DG ECFIN), and Felicitas

  03/04

  DISCUSSION

  

  In the Plex

  • 
    PEN World Voices: What Went Wrong?

    The Moth storytelling series presents "What Went Wrong?" at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival, featuring Jonathan Franzen, Warren Macdonald, Jenny Allen, Edgar Oliver, and Elif Shafa.
  • 
    Amelia Gray reads from "Threats"

    "Try to kiss me—see what happens to your lips!" In a video by Angeline Gragasin and Susan Yi, Amelia Gray reads from her forthcoming Threats while riding on a moped in L.A.
  • 
    Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis

    Out of the Vinyl Deeps reintroduces Ellen Willis's singular approach and style—her use of music to comment on broader social and political issues, critical acuity, vivid prose, against-the-grain opinions, and distinctly female (and feminist) perspective—to a new generation of readers.

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 07 Feb ' 11:38

  It's ok to have a point

  

  

  Thomas Allmer (UTI): Critical Surveillance Studies in the Information Society. From Soundings, Stuart Hall on the neoliberal revolution: Thatcher, Blair, Cameron — the long march of neoliberalism continues. The greediest among us in 2011 probably haven’t been any greedier, as a gang, than any greedy of the recent past — they just seem that way. A review of Celebritize Yourself: The Three Step Method to Increase Your Visibility by Marsha Friedman. Tom Freston's $1 Billion Revenge: Ex-Viacom chief

  In 2009, Jeannette Seaver faced two life-altering problems. Her husband of over half a century, publishing giant Richard Seaver—known for legal triumphs over censorship and for helping to introduce Beckett, Duras, Robbe-Grillet and a number of other literary heavyweights to the American market—suffered a fatal heart attack. His company, Arcade Publishing, was in a state of financial irresolution, and Jeannette was forced to file for Chapter 11. But just as confounding were the nine hundred pages of an uncompleted autobiography that Richard left behind.

  

  Steve Coll on the bin Laden Family

  • 
    A Next-generation Digital Book

    From TED 2011, Mike Matas demonstrates the first full-length interactive book for the iPad—with clever, swipeable video and graphics, and some cool data visualizations.
  • 
    Room by Emma Donaghue

    Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.
  • 
    David Markson

    David Markson reads at the 92nd Street Y in 2007.

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 07 Feb ' 04:40

  Today marks the re-release of William Gaddis’s classics The Recognitions and J R, published in 1955 and 1975, respectively. Once described by Cynthia Ozick as “the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations,” The Recognitions was a commercial flop when it first came out, prompting a book (Jack Green’sFire the Bastards!) bemoaning the novel’s weak critical reception. It was only upon the publication of J R, Gaddis’s

  • 

  

  The Next Decade in Book Culture

  • 
    Deb Olin Unferth and Ben Marcus Read New Work

    Ben Marcus gives a preview of his forthcoming novel, The Flaming Alphabet, which will be published in January 2012. But first, Deb Olin Unferth reads from her artful Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, a memoir that shifts from wise to youthful to hilarious—often in the course of a single sentence.
  • 
    Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History by Carmela Ciuraru

    George Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Claire Morgan, and others are profiled and analyzed in Carmela Ciuraru's entertaining new biographical study of writers who used pseudonyms.
  • 
    An Interview with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

    Journalist Sheryl McCarthy chats with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto about her memoir Hiroshima in the Morning, in which the author talks with people who survived the atomic attacks.

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 06 Feb ' 23:42

  Recognizing Gaddis

  Louis Auchincloss

  The New York Times Magazine

  I first came to know William Gaddis at a writers' conference in the Soviet Union in 1985. I had heard that he was shy and averse to publicity, but I found that this reputation was based only on his belief that a writer's life and personality should be as little as possible

  03/06

  Kathryn Harrison, Enchantments

  

  

  

  

  

  An Interview with Jonathan Franzen

  • 
    Jaimy Gordon reads from Lord of Misrule

    National Book Award-winner in fiction Jaimy Gordon reads from her racetrack novel Lord of Misrule at the 2010 National Book Awards finalists event.
  • 
    David Foster Wallace Interviewed by Charlie Rose

    We're currently in the midst of Pale King overload, and as everyone writes about David Foster Wallace, it can become difficult to remember what he was actually like. Here's something to refresh our memories: Excerpts from Wallace's 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, on the "Future of Fiction in the Information Age."
  • 
    Tasting Culture

    A discussion between David Chang, executive chef and owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York; Ruth Reichl, writer and editor; and the head Chef of NOMA in Copenhagen, Rene Redzepi. Reichl will moderate a discussion with these two about what cultural identity means for chefs, their menus, and the experiences of diners who sit down at their table.

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

• 06 Feb ' 19:03

  • 

  Lineage: American Poetry Since 1950

  • 
    Ai Weiwei on corruption in China

    The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose blog rants were recently published in the US, was seized by police in Beijing in early April. Anyone wondering why he's being held by the government should go directly to this video of an incendiary 2009 talk he gave in Shanghai.
  • 
    Rob Sheffield interviewed by Amanda Stern

    Rob Sheffield, author of Love is a Mix-Tape, prepares to DJ for the National Book Award's 5 Under 35 party—and explains how his set will resemble the boat-destroying scene in The Iliad.
  • 
    Mary Gaitskill dwells on love and pain, humans and pets, in this story about a stray cat. "Many people, perhaps most, would consider my feelings neurotic, a projection onto an animal of my own loneliness and fear."

  Permalink  |  View Entire Page

Search the Site

Custom Search

Blog · Discussion Group · Webmaster Tools · Advertising · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service