Books
Reader’s Diary: Rana Dasgupta’s ‘Capital’
My all-too-brief visit to Delhi last year ignited in me a desire to learn about the history of India.
Barry Schwabsky
Books
Reader’s Diary: Henry Miller's ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’
At some point in my teens I read a number of books by Henry Miller — though not as many as I read, at around the same time, by Hermann Hesse, despite the fact that Hesse’s books, in contrast to Miller’s, were not reputed to convey much information about sex.
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton’
When I wandered ingenuously onto the scene, Donald Britton was a young star, or so I considered him, just a few years older than me (actually a bit more than a few, it turns out — he always looked so boyish) yet somehow wiser.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Man Ray's ‘Writings on Art’
Jennifer Mundy acknowledges in her Preface to Man Ray’s Writings on Art that, compared to his friends Duchamp and Picabia, he has come to be seen as something of a lightweight.
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners'
What happens when you cross the perfervid emotionalism of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she of the candle burning at both ends, with Charles Olson’s idea, distilled out of William Carlos Williams, of a projective verse imbued with “the breathing of the man who writes” (and I suppose it is very emphatical
Books
Reader’s Diary: Catherine Texier’s ‘Russian Lessons’
It’s so hard to read a friend’s book without prejudice.
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘Women of Abstract Expressionism’
We think the canon of American art of the 1940s and ‘50s is set in stone, but we’ve got a lot of looking still to do.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Lorraine Lupo's 'By Way Of'
Cards on the table: I prefer short poems to long ones, slender bodies of work to massive ones. So naturally, I consider the best way to read poetry is not in a book, but in a chapbook.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Kristin Ross's 'May ’68 and Its Afterlives'
Some thought the Arab Spring could not have happened without social media. But the necessity makes the means and not vice versa. May ’68 didn’t need Facebook. They had transistor radios.
Books
Reader's Diary: ‘Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy’
No one writes letters anymore, but I still like reading them — especially when both sides of a correspondence are collected between two covers. No narrative, no argument — just the mercurial yet implicit unity of a relationship. Still, I’m not sure why I picked up this book.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Edward St. Aubyn’s ‘The Patrick Melrose Novels’ (Continued)
When I left off last week I was halfway through this quartet of low-life-in-the-midst-of-high-life novels, dissatisfied with the series’ prelude, Never Mind, but encouraged by the relative superiority of book two, Bad News.
Books
Reader's Diary: Edward St. Aubyn's ‘The Patrick Melrose Novels’
To begin reading a contemporary novel isn’t easy, if you’re not in the habit.