An Interactive Diary

Three decades after his death, the work of Romanian writer Max Blecher remains largely unavailable in English. Ricky D’Ambrose writes for The Nation about Blecher’s work. As he puts it, “Max Blecher is an obsessive saboteur of the breach between two seemingly irreconcilable positions: revulsion and lust.”

Writing about a foreign country is always a dodgy proposition, but it seems to be especially thorny when English people and Americans take on their transatlantic brethren. Looking over two contributions to the genre by English writers — Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond and A.A. Gill’s To America With Love — Carlin Romano concludes that neither manages to “teach us something new about ourselves.”

For those awkward outdoor situations in which you can’t overtly clutch a book to passively inform onlookers “hey, I read,” Fieldcandy has designed a tent that looks like a book.

“You frequently attend the opera to gossip about other patrons. You have never actually seen an opera.” How to tell if you’re in a Balzac novel.