Econ-Geo: On Enrico Moretti Econ-Geo: On Enrico Moretti
Geoeconomic arguments about jobs smuggle in neoliberal economics under the cover of geography.
Nov 28, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Catherine Tumber
Writing Without a Mattress: On Louise Glück Writing Without a Mattress: On Louise Glück
Louise Glück’s poems aim to get to the bottom of her experience without making an idol of “reality” or brute suffering.
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Robert Boyers
Ragged, Unkempt, Strange: On William Faulkner Ragged, Unkempt, Strange: On William Faulkner
For all the ways it is rife with tenderness, fury and ugliness, William Faulkner’s fiction is stubbornly persistent in its artistry.
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Joanna Scott
Indian Song Indian Song
The stone is hard The stamen & pistil of this flower yet wild yet near The city street is dark This hand, these lips The stone is hard the city street dark The wild woodlands break out open upon the subterranean plains yet wild yet near The city is dark
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Joseph Ceravolo
Untitled Untitled
All winter the leaves stay on this ground the sun The rake, the hoe the furrows the moon All winter embodies The ashes Working insects beneath
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Joseph Ceravolo
Motives and Apprehensions: On Edward P. Jones Motives and Apprehensions: On Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones’s characters know that everything they’ve worked for might suddenly be taken from them.
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Aaron Thier
Shelf Life Shelf Life
Edward Luttwack’’s The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Wertheim
Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: On Robert Caro’s LBJ Chicken Wire and Telephone Calls: On Robert Caro’s LBJ
In The Passage of Power, Robert Caro shows that LBJ’s brilliance as a politician lay not in his idealism but his opportunism.
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney
Hidden Bird Hidden Bird
Song birds enter the morning the pre-dawn before the fires, you know, when the night floats away like vapor on a lake, or like kisses in the woods. Songs that even creation might not remember. Continuous, threaded, as if a cherry pit were stuck in the throat to produce the trumpet of the branches. So varies, yet never, changing through all the days, since reptiles fell to earth. I give up the reason for the sound I give up the creature of sound and the creator of the creatures and of us and of dawn and air and of vacuum and human inhumanity. I give up the song. I give up the place
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Joseph Ceravolo
I’m Nobody, Who Are You? On Zadie Smith’s ‘NW’ I’m Nobody, Who Are You? On Zadie Smith’s ‘NW’
If you get to the top, only to find that the voice hounding you with charges of inauthenticity is your own, what then?
Nov 20, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Alexandra Schwartz