June 28, 2013
What Makes Contemporary American Poetry So Good
One of the most wonderful things about being a writer in contemporary America—besides the unprecendented ease of access to books—is our multiplicity of traditions. In the past, in smaller, more homogenous […]
June 4, 2013
Food For Thought, Force-Fed
What is interesting about the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo is, first of all, that you have a bunch of supposedly radical, violent Islamists espousing a protest technique, the stubbornly […]
May 30, 2013
The Done Deal: Drones, Legality, and Morality
A scandal about the IRS targeting the President’s political enemies breaks one week; the very next week, the President makes a speech about limiting drone strikes and giving them a […]
May 20, 2013
Less Enjoyable Screen Reading and Other Apocalypses
Last week, the UK’s National Literacy Trust released results of a survey of 35,000 UK children. Most of the headline-pullouts felt unremarkable (“on-screen reading overtakes reading in print”; “Children say they prefer […]
April 21, 2013
Goodreads Review of Reality’s New Thriller, THE PRESSURE COOKERS
One way to understand the fundamental difference between nonfiction and fiction is to consider how what works in one doesn’t work in the other. There are elements of structure, pacing, […]
March 23, 2013
Chinua Lives
It is strange and rare for a serious author to achieve the sort of near-universal good will that Chinua Achebe was granted. After all, as Chinua said, “Writers don’t give […]
March 18, 2013
Reading, 10 Years After the Invasion of Iraq
In an article in this week’s The National, Saul Austerlitz observes that there are “Plenty of factual books on the invasion of Iraq, but surprisingly few novels.” We’ll take “factual,” here, with […]
February 25, 2013
‘Like It Or Not, We’re All in Sales Now’
This was one of the opening salvos at the American Booksellers Association’s “Winter Institute 8” (or #Wi8 on Twitter, where I watched it unfold). Although keynoter Daniel Pink was speaking […]
February 13, 2013
The Abundance: OneWorld (UK) Q & A excerpt
Not to plug my own forthcoming second novel, but–aw, why the hell not? THE ABUNDANCE is coming out from Holt/Metropolitan on March 5, 2012, and from OneWorld in the UK […]
December 17, 2012
On Militias
As Americans grapple with what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary, and fiercely debate the role of weaponry in society, the phrase “a well-regulated militia” echoes off many tongues. The phrase, […]
November 19, 2012
The Machine in the Library, the Machine in the Bookstore: On Book Machines
This past week, NPR ran a story on the “Biblio-Mat,” which is exactly what it sounds like, a book dispensing machine. Reports NPR: Earlier this year, Stephen Fowler, owner of The Monkey’s […]
June 20, 2012
Short Takes: Theory of Sublimity
“Soda,” or “pop”? Here’s a more nuanced answer (maybe) to accents, intonations, inflections, and everything else that makes speech interesting. Ben Lerner, setting it straight in The New Yorker: “…I’m […]