Author: Bookfox

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 […]

What is bad writing? That’s what this new documentary asks, as it follows the journey of a terrible poet as he asks literary luminaries what they think of his work. Love the all-star lineup of authors: Margaret Atwood, David Sedaris, Nick Flynn, Steve Almond, George Saunders (and love the Saunders quote – “I had a […]

The Granta party last night at the Crocker Club — the occasion being the release of The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists — was a smash hit. David Kipen, proprietor of Libros Schmibros, lead a lively discussion with two of the contributors, Carlos Yushimito and Carlos Labbe, who opined, among other things, that the Nobel […]

If you’re depressed about the future of the written word, Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book is your Prozac. The anthology fairly pulses with admiration for the printed word (yes, only printed — sans electronic conveyance). Bound to Last features a familiar cast of literary archetypes: the hero, identified by hardback […]

In the left hand column, you will see the same link to a new page: my previous journal ranking system has been overhauled. While previously, the rankings were compiled on a number of admittedly subjective factors, now the ranking is based upon the last three years of the Best American Short Stories (BASS). I hope […]