Click here for Nathan Ihara's list of perfectly aged summer reading. Last month much ink was spilled (and pixels burnt) on Bill Clegg's Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. It's a blow-by-blow memoir about his monthlong crack bender in 2005 that temporarily cost him his job as a......
Click here for Nathan Ihara's feature The Tyranny of the New. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) by Jean RhysIf your bedroom has ever felt too small, your wine too cheap, your face too old, your family as strangers, and your love affairs mere figments of your imagination, then Jean Rhys'......
There’s a YouTube video of the literary critic James Wood in his kitchen, drumming merrily on the tabletop, a coffee mug, and a plastic bucket of chocolates while his young daughter squeals in delight. He’s in a rumpled sweater, a fringe of hair hovers above his bright, balding head, and......
Rudolph Ditzen took the pen name Hans Fallada in 1913 to protect his family — his father was a respected judge — from embarrassment at his first angst-ridden novel. He took “Hans” from the folktale of “Lucky Hans,” the story of a foolish farmer who barters away all his possessions,......
Marilynne Robinson is a genius of exegesis. There’s a rare quality of contemplation in her writing, an intensity of speculation concerning both Biblical and secular phenomena that seems lacking in many contemporary novels and, I dare say, in much religious thinking as well. A gross generalization perhaps, but novels seem......
It’s hard to figure out if Rudolph “Rudy” Wurlitzer’s new novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder, is newfangled or old hat, a relic or a revolution. In many ways, it feels like it’s being published 40 years too late. Living large and free in the Wild West, altering one’s consciousness......
An alternate reality: A shortlist of presidential candidates is released to the public. How was it generated? What does it mean? No one knows. Time passes, and it’s now November 2008, and the grand announcement is made: Dennis Kucinich is the new president of the United States. Some are overjoyed,......
I was 13 years old, romping around in the ruins of Machu Picchu, treating the terraces and temples as my personal playground, when I discovered a small hole beneath the Temple of the Condor. Groping with my hands, I went down a short tunnel into a lightless and cold chamber......
Richard Price grew up in the Bronx projects when they were a completely different animal: racially diverse, Jews, Italians, blacks working and living mostly in peace, everyone expecting the next generation to move on, move up, move out. In 1974, still in his early 20s, Price published The Wanderers, a......
David P. Barash grew up in Long Island, New York, and he loved the beaches in winter, when the people were gone and it was just him and the animals, many of which he ended up bringing home as pets. "If it walked, crawled, wriggled or flew, I had it,"......
