May 2010
D’Agata is at his best when he sheds the artifice of the lyric essay and writes straightforwardly about Yucca Mountain. More…
I got the distinct sense during my year in Berlin that the preoccupation with history’s physical imprint on the city was an Auslander phenomenon. More…
Look up Greil Marcus’s chapter on Moby-Dick in the New Literary History of America, and you’ll find a TV Guide description of John Huston’s 1956 film version—which is funny, maybe. More…
Is the philosophical program that emerges out of this double movement, between tradition and innovation, even coherent? It seems to me that x-phi simply cannot decide what it wants to do. More…
More from N1BR Issue 7
March 2010
The self-confined, self-examining tendency in newer fiction might be a global one, but the isolated and awkward countryman is almost a folk hero in Scandinavia. He’s a survivor. More…
Far beyond the explanatory debunking that her social science, which at least in principle strives for value neutrality, already provides, Solnit gives us a pamphleteering, partisan vision of utopia. More…
These are Larsson’s twin themes: the failure of the welfare state to do right by its people and the failure of men to do right by women. More…
The expectation in the American West, when looking at a map of public and private lands, is one of apparent socialism: the closest this country gets to the appropriation of property by the people. More…
More from N1BR Issue 6
November 2009
As Brooklyn has changed, so has the gentrification novel, and today’s writers are more likely to romanticize grimy dive bars than cornice moldings. More…
In July 2008, while travelling on a Greyhound bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vincent Li beheaded his sleeping seatmate, a man he had never met, with a butcher knife. More…
He is forthright about the fact that he had no need to “break in” to the old media establishment, nor did he imagine he was breaking it down. More…
Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, describes the emotional and cerebral satisfactions of skilled manual labor. More…
More from N1BR Issue 5
August 2009
When the reading is over and the inevitable question-and-answer session begins, the question invariably arises. “When exactly did you start writing?” More…
Communist ideologues are not known for their parenting skills. Take Marx, who saw families (especially his own) as obstructions to political ends. More…
Books on atheism have been selling like—well, like spiritual self-help books. More…
In a 1998 essay recently reprinted in his book Close Calls with Nonsense, critic Stephen Burt christened the “Elliptical school” of poetry. More…
More from N1BR Issue 4
May 2009
Considered in the most cynical light, the American system of education as it now exists is a status machine, absorbing young citizens, sorting them according to rigid criteria. More…
In the lurching stock market of literary fame, John Cheever’s has been fading for decades. This spring’s double-barreled canonization at least allows us finally to pose the question: Was Cheever great? More…
Posthumous insults are usually directed toward the rich and famous, and Vega was neither. More…
November in Astana—Kazakhstan’s new marble and glass capital in the middle of the empty steppe—is blisteringly cold, and distractions from the harsh wind that whips across the desolate landscape are welcome. More…
More from N1BR Issue 3
May 2009
Alex Ross is the most important arts critic writing for the New Yorker. I do not mean he is the best writer (though he may be) or the most intelligent (also possible). More…
Many readers are by now thinking: Wait a minute. Germany? Isn’t that where all that old fetish porn comes from?…Yes, but that was a generation ago. More…
Milking a cow, making a cup of coffee: these acts provide physical cathexis for psychological pain, allowing Petterson’s characters to organize and reorder a life dislocated by death. More…
Although Rice speaks passionately of her own religious awakening, it is hard not to wonder whether her return to Christ was as much a spiritual decision as an aesthetic one. More…
More from N1BR Issue 2
May 2009
Christine Schutt was one of the last writers Gordon Lish published before he left Knopf. Her early books bear the strong imprint of the Lish method; her later books tell a story of evolving from it. More…
There is a case to be made that Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher is less a book about Richard Rorty than it is a book about the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. More…
The Playboy centerfold was a world away from the European ideal of a sexually-sophisticated temptress. Hefner’s girls were always girls, first of all, or bunnies—not women. More…
Robinson’s work has long stood for me as the best repudiation of Nietzsche’s famous remark: “The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.” More…
More from N1BR Issue 1
