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 […]
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 […]
