The literary journal Open City has closed. Cue obvious puns on open/closed. They were a good literary journal, but their heyday had passed. I particularly saw the slide in the last few years, when slush pile submissions weren’t being accepted/rejected as much as sent into a type of purgatory. For instance, I ignored the prevalent […]
In Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole, a man named Budai takes the wrong flight and ends up trapped in a mysterious city in which the inhabitants speak an unplaceable dialect and the city itself seems to conspire against his escape. The novel bears the marks of Kafka, in particular Kafka’s depiction of bureaucracy as an unsolvable maze, […]
I apologize for the lethargic pace of posting in these parts — Mrs. BookFox and I are shifting residences, and my time has been filled with boxes and loan doc signings and moving vans. Also, it makes it more difficult to write when one can no longer find one’s desk, buried underneath mounds of miscelleana […]
Mrs. BookFox pointed out to me the work of Stanford Kay, who paints books in a series called “Gutenberg Variations.” She paints quite a lot of books, actually. One might call it an obsession. An obsession that has been going on since 2003. Since I’m quite skeptical of the companies that sell beautiful hardback books […]
The MLA conference in Los Angeles just drew to a close. I didn't go. I've gone before and found both stimulation and irritation. When people suggest that I attend the MLA conference, I think they believe that since I work in the English Department, I must therefore be interested in what they do at such […]
Forget thoughtful and nuanced book reviews. This Electric Literature video will tell you everything you need to know about the best canada drugs online safety books of 2010, and their ability to keep you safe from harm. Firearms and tomes involved.
The restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila, who has preserved her anonymity over the last sixteen years of reviewing food for the LA Times, was outed by the manager at Red Medicine, who reported on his Tumblr: Our purpose for posting this is so that all restaurants can have a picture of her and make a decision […]
New York Magazine highlights a woman smelling all the books in the MoMA library. She's smelled 150 books so far, and kept notes. Apparently, there's a history of this activity: Last year, in an article in the journal Analytical Chemistry, researchers led by a group from University College London’s Centre for Sustainable Heritage attempted to define the […]
Culturomics has been well covered in the last few days, on the heels of a study published in the prestigious journal, Science. Using Google Ngram Viewer, powered by Google Books, the authors studied the rise, fall, and evolution of certain terms from 1800 – 2000 in a database of 5.2 million books. The danger of […]
It’s time to take stock of my reading for the year. In the sidebar on the right, you’ll see a partial list of my books for the year. I read about 75, plus about 40 journals (the journals aren’t listed). It’s not a particularly staggering number — any bookworm who reads consistently will likely put […]
