N1BR: Issue One

From the Editors

Neil Gross's Richard Rorty
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Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Richard Rorty is less a book about Rorty than it is a book about the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. More precisely—or, more optimistically—it is a book about why it might be a problem for sociologists to continue to labor in his shadow, and how one might get out from under it.

Christine Schutt and Gordon Lish
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Carla Blumenkranz

It has been more than ten years since Lish retired, and many of his writers have continued to publish. There is something to study in the ways they have found to proceed with their careers. In Schutt's second novel, the cast of characters stays the same but the narrator is transformed.

The Complete Centerfolds
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Molly Young

My favorite Playboy centerfold is Miss September 1983, dressed for a college football game in striped socks and a tartan scarf. She has a flask, a fuzzy wool cap, and a team pennant. She is naked. It sounds funny, but somehow there's nothing funny about the photograph. Is laughter an anti-aphrodisiac?

Marilynne Robinson
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Charles Petersen

You don't have to be Christian to appreciate Robinson—her work, while close to theology, comes down on the side of poetry—but a knowledge of the faith's dying words may be required to get her meaning. In this I doubt she's much different from many of the great Jewish writers of the past half-century, believers and apostates alike.

Tony Judt
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Saul Austerlitz

You would be forgiven, upon reading the panoply of negative reviews of Judt's Reappraisals, for thinking his latest book was a screed, a Kassam rocket of scorn and derision directed at the state of Israel by a confirmed anti-Zionist.

Reality Publishing
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Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

I tried to justify the contest and my participation in it. After all, I thought, the public voting might encourage reading in a fun way. But none of it quite worked; I still felt queasy. It was probably out of guilt that I began to check the message boards.