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Partial Cast List, Ulysses
(He hurries out through the hall. The whores point. Florry follows, spilling water from her tilted tumbler. On the doorstep all the whores clustered talk volubly, pointing to the right where the fog...
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A Short Bright Flash (Book Acquired, 5.15.2013)
Theresa Levitt’s A Short Bright Flash, new in hardback from WW Norton, traces the story of scientist and engineer Augustin Fresnel, a major contributor to wave optics. Fresnel originated a lens that...
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“On the Art of Fiction”— Willa Cather
“On the Art of Fiction” by Willa Cather One is sometimes asked about the “obstacles” that confront young writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest obstacles that writers today...
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Saul Bellow’s Review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
“Man Underground,” a Review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, by Saul Bellow A few years ago, in an otherwise dreary and better forgotten number of Horizon devoted to a louse-up of life in the United...
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“Casablanca, or, the Clichés Are Having a Ball”— Umberto Eco
“Casablanca, or, the Clichés Are Having a Ball” by Umberto Eco When people in their fifties sit down before their television sets for a rerun of Casablanca, it is an ordinary matter of nostalgia....
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Marshall Brooks Talks to Biblioklept About Microlibraries, Indie Publishing,...
Marshall Brooks’s recent collection of memoir-essays Paperback Island explores the ways that friendship and place influence what we read, how we read, and how we make—and keep—books. Marshall began his...
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Huxley vs. Orwell: The Webcomic
Stuart McMillen’s webcomic adapts (and updates_ Postman’s famous book-length essay, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World was...
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Interrogation II — Leon Golub
“Recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators, a stupid grin on their faces, included in the picture, side by side with the twisted naked bodies of their prisoners, is an integral...
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“The Story of the Ram”— Mark Twain
“The Story of the Old Ram” by Mark Twain Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather’s old ram but they...
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“The Declaration of Independence — In American”— H.L. Mencken
The Declaration of Independence in American by H. L. Mencken 1921 WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook,...
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George Catlin Biography (Book Acquired, Some Time Back in the End of June)
The end of June kinda got away with me with these books acquired posts. Anyway, I haven’t really made any time to check out Benita Eisler’s biography of lawyer-turned-painter George Catlin, a...
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Gertrude Stein on Football
In a 1934 radio interview, Gertrude Stein talks American football: INTERVIEWER: You saw the Yale-Dartmouth game a week ago Saturday didn’t you? Did you understand that in the American way or the...
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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 (Book Acquired, Sometime Last Week)
Here are the table of contents for the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories: Your Duck Is My Duck, by DEBORAH EISENBERG Sugarcane, by DEREK PALACIO The Summer People, by KELLY LINK Leaving Maverley, by ALICE...
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Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a perfect novella
With blunt grace, Denis Johnson navigates the line between realism and the American frontier myth in his perfect novella Train Dreams. In a slim 116 pages, Johnson communicates one man’s life story...
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Brown and the Farrier | A menacingly comic vignette from Cormac McCarthy’s...
A self-contained episode from late in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; this little vignette captures the book’s strange mix of menace and humor: Noon he was red-eyed and reeking before the alcalde’s...
View ArticleHerman Melville’s Whale Steaks
In Chapter LXIV of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Stubb, second mate of the Pequod, demands whale steaks for dinner. He’s not happy with how the cook has prepared the steaks though, complaining they are...
View ArticleJudge Holden holds forth on war (Blood Meridian)
From Chapter XVII of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian— They grew gaunted and lank under the white suns of those days and their hollow burnedout eyes were like those of noctambulants surprised by...
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