Melville House’s “Art of the Novella” series gets some major, major love from Joe Fassler in The Atlantic.
Not Quite a Novel, Not Quite a Tweet
Reading Biblical Narrative
Philip Esler’s new book Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative with its Ancient Audience, reintroduces our culture to some of the Bible’s most dramatic narratives.
False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. “If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers,” she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
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Detective Edgar Allan Poe
Before Maxwell’s ever opened, Edgar Allan Poe tried to solve a murder mystery in my native Hoboken.
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Pen Pals Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Janet Maslin at the New York Times reviews the collection Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters: “‘Hasn’t it been awful?’ Kerouac would write to Ginsberg in 1959. ‘We were so swingy? And now young poets are sneering at us?’”
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Gossip, Gossip Everywhere
This essay on the proliferation of gossip in journalism is adapted from Joseph Epstein’s Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit. In it, Epstein discusses the problem of “how straight-up, no-apologies public gossip has infected standard, or what once might have been called respectable, journalism.”
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