Category: Literary

  • The Legend of Gary Shteyngart’s Blurbs

    A smart, amusing look at the strange publishing practice of blurbing new books and how Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart has emerged as a kind of blurbing king pin who will seemingly blurb just about anything, and do it with real flair. The short 15-minute video has dozens of interviews with New York writers, critics and editors,…

  • William Giraldi: Tough-Love Critic

    A new essay or book review by critic William Giraldi has become something of an event. In a world where bloggers discuss how they “feel” about a book, and the online literati praise every new novel as if it were Ulysses, Giraldi has become the adult in the room, reminding us what true criticism can…

  • Javier Marias Turns Down Literary Prize

    Spanish novelist Javier Marias has turned down a €20,000 literary prize from the Spanish government.

  • Javier Marias’ ‘Your Face Tomorrow’ Trilogy

    I have begun re-reading the novel Fever and Spear by the Spanish novelist Javier Marias. It is the first volume in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy that is published in the U.S. by New Directions. Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt said the books were what detective novels would sound like if Henry James had written them. Marias’…

  • Writing and War

    It is disheartening to learn that Afghanistan is now officially the longest war in U.S. history. It would have been inconceivable to Americans in 1975, that in a few short decades after the Vietnam War, we’d enter into another long conflict. Politics and military strategy aside, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already produced a…

  • Henry James Meets Proust’s Characters

    One of the pleasures of reading literary biographies is learning what happened when famous “writer A” met famous “writer B” for the first time. Some of the great encounters are a young James Joyce meeting W.B. Yeats (or later Samuel Beckett meeting Joyce), Oscar Wilde hiding in the Proust family bathroom, because Marcel was late, and Wilde couldn’t deal with…