The Quarterly Conversation has just unveiled its Winter 2007 issue, with a Hispanic literature theme. Well worth your time.
The Weekly Standard has another article detailing the resistance to Google’s digitization program for millions of books.
Ten Top Manly Writers. I could add a few more modern ones to the list, but they’ve covered the classic writers quite well.
The Village Voice picks their top 20 books. Of special note is “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” which has been popping up on quite a few of the top lists, “Christine Falls” by Benjamin Black (pseudonym for John Banville), and a personal favorite, “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved” by Judith Freeman. It should be mentioned that two short story collections are included: “Varieties of Disturbance” by Lydia Davis and “No One Belongs Here More Than You” by Miranda July, both of which speak volumes about the staff taste (I do like Miranda July, I admit). As far as Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” I thought it was fun but not necessarily something that should be on the best-of-the-year list.
A review of “The Best American Essays of 2007” turns into a polemic on what’s wrong with the genre of the essay.
Issue #6 of N+1 is out, and I went and talked with them at one of the readings. Many thoughts, can’t put them all down now. Online they have an essay about Gawker.
Modernism is over? Tell that to Fredric Jameson. Postmodernity is just a phase, baby, just a phase in modernity’s cycle.
