Saul Bellow on being Jewish in America, and Lorin Stein, in an interview, discusses contemporary Jewish writers.
Jewish America
On bad taste
In the world of fine art, is there such a thing as bad taste anymore? Based on the recent Swedish MOMA cake controversy, I'd say, um, heck yes.
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“Once on This Island”
“I thought it was going to be a short novel, that it was one person’s story. But I was wrong, because history is always shaping everything.” The New York Times reviews Marlon James's latest novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which we covered in our "Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview."
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There Once Was an Astronaut from Nantucket
Forget learning how to fly, better practice your haiku and limerick writing skills. NASA applicants are asked to write a tweet, limerick or haiku. Is Colonel Chris Hadfield to blame?
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To Booker or Not to Booker
Maybe you’re a speed-reader or maybe you’re a psychic who plans their reading lists months ahead of time. Those are the only two possible scenarios by which you may have finished reading all of the books on this year’s Man Booker Long List. And if that’s the case, it’s time to get started on The Guardian’s “Not The Booker” Long List.
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Can Cash Money be Caro’s Next Project?
Eric Brightwell has written a great primer on “the independent years” of Cash Money Records (ca. 1991-1998). Now that the outfit has its own publishing arm, Cash Money Content, I suggest you brush up.
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Authentic Explanations
For Public Books, Matthew Clair considers authoritative black knowledge in intellectual practices and “the logic of racial authenticity,” which “stipulates both that black intellectuals have a particular responsibility to represent, in both senses of that word, ‘their’ people, and that, as racial insiders, they are uniquely capable of doing so.”
Egyptian Writers on the “Unfinished Revolution”
In the run-up to the Egyptian elections, writers and booksellers discuss the military clampdown following Mubarak's fall.
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The Mystery is Coming From Inside the White House
"One reason presidents are drawn to the genre is surely its escapism — its promise to replace impossible decisions with comforting formulas." For The New York Times, Craig Fehrman writes about United States presidents who have a predilection for mystery novels. If you need your mystery fix too, we have a list with five crime books with female detectives.