In an age where organizations mount campaigns to rescue book reviews from death, the number of independent bookstores drop year by year, and publishers bemoan their profit margins and wail about the difficulty of their job, it’s nice to see people fight over books. Yes, fight. No, not with words. More like fisticuffs, but less […]
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Book Fight
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The Quarterly Conversation
Issue Eight of The Quarterly Conversation has now been released! It includes my review of Haruki Murakami’s latest, After Dark, a review written in real-time (since the book is almost in real time). Some of the other highlights are a review of Daniel Alarcon’s novel Lost City Radio – an incredible book from an incredible […]
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Ouch
On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s latest novel, received mostly favorable reviews after its release in Britain earlier this year, but today Michiko Kakutani lays out a nasty opener in the NY Times Review: “After two big, ambitious novels — “Atonement” and “Saturday” — Ian McEwan has inexplicably produced a small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses […]
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Interview with Jess Row
Jess Row, recently named one of Granta‘s Best Young American Novelists, has written one collection of stories – The Train to Lo Wu – and is working on another, tentatively titled The Answer, that deals with religious fundamentalism in the aftermath of 9/11. We talked about how his fiction builds models of karmic processes, how […]
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Roundup: New Novels and Deprivation
David Mitchell’s new novel. A bookstore owner burns books in protest of America’s lack of support for the written word. Um, actually, America supports the written word rather well, to the tune of 200,000 new books per year in America alone, so we just can’t handle the onslaught of the printed page. Also, depends what […]
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The Bomb, Dmitri … The Hydrogen Bomb.
So I don’t normally post on BookFox about non-fiction titles, but I’m making an exception for William Langewiesche’s new book The Atomic Bazaar, which addresses the proliferation of nuclear weapons (if the title didn’t tip you off). I’ve been reading Langewiesche in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly for a while now, and his articles […]
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Open Letter
Dear Ed, I miss you. I mean, the monkeys running your site are fun and all, but they’re even crazier than you (or maybe I’m just adjusted to your frequency of crazy). Certainly Erin O’Brien is crazier than you. Every post of hers is labeled with breasts. You would never do that, Ed. You would […]
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Train to Lo Wu
Just read Jess Row’s Train to Lo Wu, a collection of seven short stories as streamlined as a bullet train. All the stories take place in Hong Kong, using the class, language and political distinctives of the city to ground stories about echolocation and Zen Buddhism. Luckily for me (and you), there’s a new Row […]
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Litblog Co-op READ THIS!
The Spring 2007 READ THIS! titles have been chosen over at the Litblog Co-op, and you’re going to have to mosey on over there to check out the selections.