Being neither rocket-scientist material nor chipper by temperament, I have never been able to pile up the tower of steaming hubris it would take to convince myself that the world needs me to pass my genetic load of dyspeptic ire on to a child. So writing about the "young adult" genre of ...
Lately I"ve been hearing more and more dribs and drabs of the depressing controversy over whether literature has any empire left over pop culture. Well, that depends on what you mean by "literature." Up till the middle of last century, it was still fashionable to write realist, ...
Young Lena Dunham, the most talked-about writer of her generation, is finally about to publish something like a book. Oh, goody. Prior to Not That Kind of Girl, an autobiographical advice book, her writing has comprised an autobiographical television show (Girls), an autobiographical film, and ...
Not five months out from its launch this March, the right-leaning literary website Liberty Island recently earned a logic-impaired hate note from the fiction editor of the Washington Post himself, Ron Charles. Charles apparently thinks he can defang the idea that the orthodox left is strangling ...
People get breathtakingly angry when they think they"ve gotten away with something ... and then they don"t. The more time has passed between the deed and the discovery, the greater the shock to one's system. And the fear you feel as the truth starts breathing down your neck converts to rage ...
Sometimes a book is so rich and alive that through a kind of synesthesia it makes you rethink your crotchety opinions about other art forms. Bradley Smith's new book, for example, A Personal History of Moral Decay, weaves the texture of life so clearly that it almost made me like postmodern ...
The New York Times" first female executive editor was recently canned after only three years on the job, and geniuses from Gawker to New Republic instantly assumed it was because of her sex, though ovaries didn"t stop the Times from hiring her in the first place"apparently unwisely. ...
