Blog Profile / The Book Bench
| URL : | http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Literature | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1389 | |
| Posts / Week: | 11.4 | |
| Archived Since: | February 17, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing
I was in the Time magazine archives recently, doing research for my biography of J. D. Salinger, when I pulled open a drawer and found a small box containing a bunch of discarded typewriter heads for the I.B.M. Selectric typewriter—the cutting-edge writing technology of my youth. Show More Summary
Book News: Blumesday and Bloomsday, Pynchon in New York
Yesterday was Blumesday, an annual holiday held in honor of Judy Blume. (Bloomsday, the annual celebration of “Ulysses,” was on Sunday).
The words “tweet” and “crowdsourcing” have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Oliver Pötzsch...Show More Summary
This Week in Fiction: Thomas McGuane
Your story in this week’s issue, “Stars,” which is set in Montana, begins with a scene in which your protagonist, an astronomer named Jessica, confronts a man who has trapped and is about to shoot a wolf. Jessica argues that the wolf...Show More Summary
Writers and the Optimal-Child-Count Spectrum
Lauren Sandler, the author of “One and Only,” a new book about only children, published an essay on the Web site of The Atlantic last week remarking on the fact that many of the female writers she most admires—Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ellen Willis—all had only one child. Show More Summary
Book News: Auden’s Diary, Brando’s Afterlife
The Egyptian writer Karam Saber has been sentenced to five years in prison for a short-story collection entitled “Where Is God?”
Excerpts from W. H. Auden’s long-lost diary, which was auctioned off at Christie’s for seventy-four thousand...Show More Summary
Odessa: City of Writerly Love
Walking along Pushkin Street on the kind of dazzling spring day the Odessan writer Aleksandr Kuprin warned visitors to avoid—the smell of acacias in bloom, he wrote, can induce newcomers to fall in love and take foolish steps, like getting...Show More Summary
Book News: Motherly Writers, Shakespeare in Space
“The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.” Zadie Smith weighs in on the idea that having no more than one child is the secret to success for female writers.
NPR on the decline in the difficulty...Show More Summary
Three Beards
1. In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife, Kirby. Show More Summary
Book News: Revisiting “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Bradley Manning Comic
Sales of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” have surged in the wake of the N.S.A. surveillance revelations. (Ian Crouch examines the novel’s relevance today.)
Ringo Starr is turning “Octopus’s Garden” into a children’s book.
TheShow More Summary
Born Again
After receiving a hundred of his letters, meeting him fifteen times, either at his apartment on Bilu Street or at a Tel Aviv café, and receiving too many calls from his cell phone to ever hope to return, I gave up trying to count the number of times that Yoram Kaniuk had died. Show More Summary
The N.S.A.’s Chief Chronicler
In 1982, long before most Americans ever had to think about warrantless eavesdropping, the journalist James Bamford published “The Puzzle Palace: A Report on N.S.A., America’s Most Secret Agency,” the first book to be written about the...Show More Summary
Book News: Writers and Mothers, Ginsberg’s Borscht
Days before the release of his twenty-seventh novel, the author Iain Banks died, at the age of fifty-nine. “Charlotte’s Webcam” and other classic children’s books adapted for a world with N.S.A. surveillance. Is having only one child...Show More Summary
Songs of the Cicada
When I was a child, I loved bugs and the Bible. The two met one summer when all anyone could talk about was a plague of locusts. It was 1996, and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland everyone—farmers, gardeners, even people who simply cared...Show More Summary
Italy’s Most Faithful Foreign Lover
Italy almost irresistibly tempts foreign commentators to cliché. It’s far too easy to wander off into rhapsodies over the country’s stunning beauty, grand sense of history, and sensual pleasures. Or, ignoring the bella figura, one can...Show More Summary
Mystic Pizza
I have never thrown a dinner party without experiencing at least one moment of knee-knocking, might-as-well-blow-up-the-brisket panic. Once, when a risotto took on the consistency of nearly dry cement, I lay down on the floor and refused to get up. Show More Summary
Memories of a Public Square
In order to make sense of events in Istanbul and to understand those brave people who are out on the street, fighting against the police and choking on tear gas, I’d like to share a personal story. In my memoir, “Istanbul,” I wrote about how my whole family used to live in the flats that made up the Pamuk apartment block, in Ni?anta??. Show More Summary
Book News: First-Editions Club, British Bitchery
Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn is one of a growing number of sellers seeking to appeal to collectors by launching first-editions clubs.
Peter Osnos reports on the general optimism among book publishers at last week’s B.E.A.
Clive James...Show More Summary
The Formidable Friendship of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt
In the new film “Hannah Arendt,” the political theorist’s friendship with the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy gets its first cinematic treatment. The results are not good. McCarthy, played by a struggling Janet McTeer, is blowsily silly—and by anyone’s account, though she could be wicked and subversively funny, McCarthy was far from silly. Show More Summary
This Week in Fiction: Annie Proulx
Your story in this week’s issue, “Rough Deeds,” is set among the men who tried to capitalize on New England’s forests in the first half of the eighteenth century. What drew you to the subject?
One of my earliest infant memories is of light filtering down through tree leaves, as my mother often put me under a tree to nap. Show More Summary
Book News: Apple Trial Begins, Humans of the B.E.A.
The trial to determine whether Apple is guilty of e-book price-fixing is underway.
A Chilean judge has ordered that police begin a hunt for the man who, according to new evidence, may have poisoned Pablo Neruda forty years ago.
The liquor...Show More Summary