August 2012
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Radar LARB
“Writer-on-Writer Crimes” by Andrew Scott: “If ‘the literary world’ excludes ‘regular’ readers—if it really just means other writers, editors at literary journals and magazines, editors at presses both small and large, agents, publicists, sales forces, independent bookstore owners and big chain bookstore employees, distributors, professors and students...
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Cafe Society
The unavoidable feeling of despair that Mahfouz captures permeates Egyptian society today — a condition all too often overlooked by the new crop of Egypt experts multiplying within international media. While the revolution marked a high point in the ability of people to organize in the Middle East, the people of Egypt remain divided, conflicted and downright frightened at the current state of...
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Hubris and Envy
Robert Zaretzky with some historical perspective on the Lehrer affair:
His book, hailed by the critics, presents itself as a guide to human nature; it claims scientific rigor, yet is written for the non-specialist. And then, it is discovered that when he is not recycling old material, the author has simply invented new material, fobbed it off as true and put it in the mouths of the people he...
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Radar LARB
“Parisian Novels” | Vincent Van Gogh
“Ignoring David Foster Wallace’s Religion” by Daniel Silliman: “The forthcoming biography of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, seems very unlikely to shed any light on Wallace’s faith or spirituality.
Though it’s known...
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Wax Poetics
“BLOODLESS DUELING with wax bullets” made only one appearance at the Olympics: the 1908 games that moved from Rome to London after an eruption at Mt. Vesuvius. According to Popular Science magazine, “great interest was taken in the bloodless dueling tournament,” but it’s not difficult to imagine why Olympic officials might remove an event in which people, representing nations, shoot live ammo...
