Doesn’t the title look weird? It felt weird to type. For so many years I’ve been going to UCLA for the LA Times Festival of Books, but this year the location has been switched to my alma mater. Glad as I am to have USC host the event, I do have reservations about the campus. […]
I was surfing through old book reviews and came across a widely repeated quote from James Wood (in a review of The Corrections) describing contemporary American fiction: “Curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Detroit! […]
In the Huffington Post, Anis Shivani published a take-down of the NYTBR, provocatively titled “The Death of the New York Times Book Review: And Why That Is a Good Thing for Books.” One overarching criticism Shivani makes, at least judging by his language, is that the NYTBR is too elite. He uses the word “elite” […]
I love Forgotten Bookmarks, which offers pictures of fascinating objects stowed away inside books. First-name-only Michael, the proprietor, is a rare and antique bookseller who runs through five- to six-hundred books a day and shares the treasures between their pages. Highlights include an honest-to-God saw blade, (did the reader consider the book sharp or in need […]
This documentary about how to make a book sounds chock full of sobering market realities. It's a German film (though not exclusively in subtitles) following Gerhard Steidl, one of the few publishers running their own printing press. Fortunately, it's not about how to write a book (now that would be a dull documentary), but covers everything that […]
I’m very glad that the New Yorker chose to reprint Haruki Murakami’s story “UFO in Kushiro” in their March 28th issue, because ever since the earthquake in Sendai I’ve been thinking about Murakami’s collection After the Quake. After the Quake is a collection of short stories written after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and every story deals […]
BookFox has received a long overdue makeover (thank you Mrs. BookFox and Jess at Blackbird Portraits). Leave hate mail, off-topic rants and effulgent praises in the comments.
The Paris Review is serializing Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich (El Tercer Reich), an early novel discovered in his papers after his death. Bolano wrote the novel in 1989, before his hyper-productive decade that produced 2666 and The Savage Detectives, but rather than displaying a nascent version of his talent, the novel bears a strikingly resemblance […]
Japan might have been big news over the weekend, but now it’s time to fill out the brackets for March Madness. Let’s be honest: we all know which event has a longer life span. A nuclear reactor might contaminate Japan with radioactive waste for decades, but winning your office pool is forever. You might think […]
Anthony Doerr just won The Story Prize for his collection “Memory Wall.” He wins $20,000, while the two runners-up win $5,000. Doerr is no stranger to accolades — Granta also named him in the Best of Young American Novelists. One unusual fact about this collection, other than its memory-centric theme, is that it only contains […]
