Hello loyal BookFox readers, I’m taking off to South America with Mrs. BookFox for six weeks, until August 9th. Going to visit Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Why? Because neither of us has been there, no other reason. The vacation time is the blessed union of when a teacher marries another teacher. Since I’ll be […]
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a lovely essay at The Washington Post that’s supposedly about the desks she learned to write upon, but it’s really more about the love of the house where she grew up. Thought the whole fatwa on Salman Rushdie had slipped into the dustbin of history? Not quite. Rushdie was knighted and […]
Michael Ondaatje’s latest book Divisadero, as the name implies, is a divided book. In the first half, three character’s stories are told: two sisters and the hired hand Coop at the ranch. The first chapter, set in rural California, involves these characters in a tragedy, and each of the character’s stories is spun out separately […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
Rattawut Lapcharoensap, born in Chicago but raised in Bangkok, was just named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. Sightseeing, his collection of short stories, won the Asian American Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. In our recent conversation, we discussed the best Thai writers, how tourism is a form […]
Even though The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was generally panned by critics (not just by Marilynne Robinson, although her dismantling in the pages of Harper’s was certainly one of the most thorough), his book sold quite well. Perhaps riding on the swell of attention Dawkin’s book received, now we have a book of the […]
