July 11 , 2024 
The Smart Set
The good, the bad, and advice for the future.
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June 27 , 2024 
The Smart Set
Becca Rothfeld’s lit crit goes big.
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February 7 , 2023 
The Arts Fuse
Machado de Assis subverts everything.
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January 9 , 2023 
Quillette
The greatest literary conference that never happened.
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December 30 , 2022
The Arts Fuse
Andre Dubus III wonders if you can keep a good man down.
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March 28 , 2023 
The Arts Fuse
A new Death in Venice.
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February 8 , 2023 
American Purpose
Greil Marcus on Dylan.
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February 5, 2023 
The Critic
Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation
QT obsesses over cinematic tough guys.
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November 29, 2022 
Book and Film Globe
Exploring (not enough of) the history of jazz and the underworld.
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June 16, 2022 
American Purpose
Joyce and Eliot’s masterworks at 100. And here’s a podcast episode I did about them in Norway: Er «Ulysses» fremdeles aktuell, 100 år etter utgivelsen? – Civita
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May 12, 2022 
American Purpose
How the two Romantics differ.
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April 28, 2022 
The Baffler
Maud Newton talks to the skeletons in the family closet.
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August 3, 2021 
The Baffler
The language of fanaticism.
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June 25, 2021 
American Purpose
A mini history of movie directors.
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May 17, 2021 
The Arts Fuse
The postmodern blues.
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May 4, 2021
The Arts Fuse
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
Race, representation, and rock.
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March 19, 2021
American Purpose
A noirish meditation on American history.
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January 5, 2021
Harvard Review
Kierkegaard’s anxious romanticism .
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December 17, 2020 
The Baffler
What Steinbeck knew about fascism and economic anxiety.
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November 17, 2020 
The Arts Fuse
Joshua Bennett’s virtuosic poetry.
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November 16, 2020 
Book and Film Globe
An uncategorizable testament to a life in letters.
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October 31, 2020 
LA Review of Books
Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street at 100
The sardonic bestseller’s vision of America then and now.
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August 2, 2020 
The American Interest
The Enduring Chill of Flannery O’Connor
What her cackling, dire stories can tell us now.
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July 12, 2020 
The American Interest
A new selected poems fails the curious reader.
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June 29, 2020 
The Arts Fuse
Rereading A Confederacy of Dunces
Revisiting Ignatius J Reilly’s corpulent scorn.
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June 15, 2020 
The Arts Fuse
A Gothic romance on the female superego.
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May 18, 2020 
The Baffler
On Fitzgerald’s novel and its myths.
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March 24, 2020 
The Arts Fuse
Clive James, Burning Brightly at the Last
The omni-skilled James gets his literary due.
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February 12, 2020 
The Arts Fuse
A Woman in the Boy’s Club of Writers
Madeline Miller’s tale of editing, writing, and DFW.
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January 10, 2020 
The American Interest
James Wood and The Art of Criticism
“Literature teaches us to notice.”
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December 29, 2019 
The New Yorker
What John Dos Passos Got Right About 2019
How a Depression-era trilogy understood the American jitters, both then and now.
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December 15, 2019 
The American Interest
A minor-key masterpiece about ordinary life, the pursuit of passions, and the lost art of paying attention.
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October 19, 2019 
The American Interest
The Staying Power of Sartre’s No Exit
The existentialist drama still speaks profoundly to our age of social media-fueled isolation.
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August 30, 2019 
The Arts Fuse
The Nickel Boys- Keeping the Faith
Whitehead has a keen eye for the insidious ways in which institutions work.
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August 23, 2019 
The Baffler
The radical poetics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti on his hundredth birthday.
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August 19, 2019 
The Arts Fuse
“Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had that I could call my own…”
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January 15, 2019 
The Arts Fuse
American Audacity- Literature is the One Religion Worth Having
Demanding that people pay attention to quality writing is about as audacious a demand as you can make in our giddy culture.
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June 24, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Being able to comfortably shift gears between “high” and “low” culture is one of the easiest ways in which a contemporary critic can gain the reader’s trust.
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May 25, 2018
The Arts Fuse
“Secrets and Shadows” — Lessons of the Past
A reminder of what it means to carry a historical burden on both a personal and national level.
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April 3, 2018
The Baffler
On the fiftieth anniversary of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks: Is Boston in an era of musical decline?
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March 24, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Book Review: Susan Sontag’s Collected Stories — From the Back Burner
Susan Sontag wrote short stories as a hobby; she saved more of her enormous intellectual energy for her novels and essays.
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February 12, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Book Review: Ezra Pound in “The Bughouse”
For all his literary fecundity, Ezra Loomis Pound was also more than a little bonkers.
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January 27, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Book Review: “In a Lonely Place” — In the Mind of a Misogynist
Dorothy B. Hughes is one of the finest writers of noir; ample proof can be found in this darkly glittering novel.
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January 21, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Book Review: Lou Reed — A Welter of Contradictions
DeCurtis wants to do justice to Reeds’ extensive discography, but the book begins to feel less like exegesis and more like Lou Reed 101.
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December 10, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Book Review: “The Golden House” — More Surreal by the Minute
Rushdie tells the story of the elite Golden family via long and labyrinthine subplots that are hard to follow.
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October 25, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Book Review: Patti Smith’s “Devotion” — Not Devoted Enough
The short volume promises a glimpse into the great priestess of punk’s intuitive creative process — but disappoints.
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July 22, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Poetry Review: Bill Knott’s American Surrealism – A Magic Carpet Ride
Perhaps what makes Bill Knott’s underrated poetry so addictive is his uncanny ability to turn language inside out, flouting and then altering a reader’s expectations of what a poem can be.
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May 28, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Book Review: “Age of Anger” — Politics United in Hate
In his profound and timely Age of Anger, historian Pankaj Mishra finds the key to Trump-worship.
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April 30, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Lyrical Outrage — Songs of the Resistance
Many of the poems live up to the title’s shout-out to Walt Whitman by cutting through the current political miasma with fresh wit, insight, and lyrical outrage.
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March 18, 2017
The Arts Fuse
“With the Radio On” — The Modern Lovers, Aptly Canonized
The regional specificity of “Roadrunner” especially hits home for Bay Staters, but really it could take place anywhere, maybe even on Route 66.
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February 23, 2017
The Arts Fuse
“The Shipwrecked Mind” — Leaving the Carnage Behind
Mark Lilla argues convincingly that the creed of the reactionary mind can be just as radical (and disturbing) as any revolutionary ideology.
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February 8, 2017
The Arts Fuse
“The Feud” — Brilliant Literary Frenemies
Alex Beam generates interest via his portrait of frenemies Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov as brainy but flawed human beings.
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December 21, 2016
The Arts Fuse
The Oral History Lowdown on “The Daily Show”
The backstage story of the show is interesting to fans, but it’s also relevant to understanding the evolution of political satire.
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November 6, 2016
The Arts Fuse
“The Hero’s Body” — Let’s Get Physical
William Giraldi was enticed by the fraternity of the gym as a way of filling out and firming up both his body and his sense of self.
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October 25, 2016
The Arts Fuse
Mark Greif’s “Against Everything” — But For Nothing?
Mark Greif’s analyses can be sharply counter-intuitive, but once we absorb the meaning of his criticism there’s less than we expect.
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October 9, 2016
The Arts Fuse
Analyzing Musical Fisticuffs — “Your Favorite Band is Killing Me”
Steven Hyden doesn’t really pick a side in these fights; even though he’s got his favorites, he’s broad minded enough to know and enjoy every artist’s work.
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September 29, 2016
The Arts Fuse
Watching TV with Omnicultural Smarts — Clive James’ “Play All”
Clive James is cosmopolitan and learned, but he’s far from a snob. He’s equally at home translating Dante by day and delightedly re-watching episodes of The West Wing at night.
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August 8, 2016
The Arts Fuse
“Smedley’s Secret Guide to Literature” — Teenage Lit-Land
This savvy, witty, and casually erudite novella proves that when it comes portraying adolescence in fiction, the less sentimentality the better.
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June 28, 2016
The Arts Fuse
“American Rhapsody” — A Lucid Song of Ourselves
One of the seemingly unintentional ironies of American Rhapsody is that most of the artists Pierpont takes up didn’t find life in America to be rhapsodic at all.
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May 7, 2016
The Arts Fuse
Writer Delmore Schwartz — New Directions Gives His Volatile Brilliance its Due
Once and For All asserts the value of Delmore Schwartz’s provocative and multifaceted literary legacy.
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April 8, 2016
The Arts Fuse
Christopher Hitchens — Final Stings From the Gadfly
The fact that some of these pieces could have been written yesterday says more for the eternal recurrence of the moronic inferno of political life than for Hitchens as a social prophet.
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March 26, 2016
The Arts Fuse
“Really the Blues” — Memorable Tales of Jazz Age Derring-do
For all his memoir’s faults, Mezz Mezzrow’s rambunctious enthusiasm for jazz and the world it shaped and defined keeps the pages turning.
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February 13, 2016
The Arts Fuse
“And Again” — Biological Engineering, Predictable Construction
What’s most interesting about And Again is precisely what gets the least narrative attention.
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January 28, 2016
The Arts Fuse
“Symphony for the City of the Dead” — On Art and Human Survival
M. T. Anderson writes with a compellingly dark tone and a keen eye for characterization worthy of adult readership.
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January 11, 2016
The Arts Fuse
The Lucidly Chilling “Massacre on the Merrimack” — The Woman Who Killed Indians
Jay Atkinson does a great service to the complexities of history by portraying the bloody tragedy of each side’s mutually deadly incomprehension.
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December 11, 2015
The Arts Fuse
“The Christos Mosaic” — An Exciting Historical/Theological Thriller
The Christos Mosaic turns out to be the rare adventure story that rewards the reader’s attention by being as diverting as it is rigorously encyclopedic.
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October 24, 2015
The Arts Fuse
“City on Fire” — Epic Literary Kindling
For a long novel, City on Fire is generously accessible, and one of its strengths is in its absorbing, immersive momentum.
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October 14, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Critic and Poet Clive James — Reading and Writing Until the Lights Go Out
Clive James eagerly gets the most out of whatever’s on the page and isn’t shy about making larger connections within history, politics, and the inexorable flow of time.
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October 1, 2015
The Arts Fuse
“The Invisible Bridge” — Stranger and Scarier Than Fiction
As our current group of GOP presidential contenders make their ritual obeisance to the sacred memory of the Ronald Reagan, it’s useful to be reminded that the record shows the revered All-American icon to be more simulacrum than savior.
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August 7, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Literary Critic James Wood and the Art of ‘Deep Noticing’
We will always need critics to show us how literature works by revering it rather than interrogating it as if it had committed a crime.
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July 5, 2015
The Arts Fuse
“Adrift” in a Memorably Neo-Beat World
The protagonist’s version of barroom existentialism works as an unofficial précis for the struggle to make it through another day of being human.
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May 14, 2015
The Arts Fuse
“We All Looked Up” — A Book and Album Where Adolescence Meets the Apocalypse
It’s not by accident that some of the greatest coming-of-age stories are concerned with deconstructing social stereotypes.
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May 5, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Peter Gizzi’s “In Defense of Nothing” — Poetry as the Fruit of Bewilderment
Peter Gizzi is a master at allowing his poetic language to summon its own range of meanings, rather than blatantly declaring them to the reader.
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March 6, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Ned Beauman’s Unconventional “Glow”
Glow is a witty, accessible, but at times overly ambitious journey through the world of exotic drugs, the chemistry of romance, and the insidious effects of globalization.
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February 20, 2015
The Arts Fuse
“Selected Letters of Norman Mailer” — Many More Pieces of His Mind
It’s refreshing and more than a little nostalgic to see the trials, triumphs, and tribulations of Mailer’s time through his own combative eyes, before writers were marginalized as influential public figures.
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January 30, 2015
The Arts Fuse
“The Water-Babies” — A Darwinian Fairy Tale by an Eccentric’s Eccentric
Why is The Water-Babies a classic English fairy tale? It doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet it doesn’t ignore important issues. It’s culturally irreverent without being juvenile or simplistic.
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December 5, 2014
The Arts Fuse
Emile Zola’s “The Conquest of Plassans” — “Tartuffe” Gone Realpolitik
Entertaining yet incisive, The Conquest of Plassans remains a devastatingly acute reminder that religion and politics make surprisingly compatible bedfellows.
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October 30, 2014
The Arts Fuse
“The Zone of Interest” — Not Quite Interesting Enough
Martin Amis’s fiction, bleak though it often is, paradoxically remains compelling and pleasurable to read because of how well he writes about dreadful things.
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July 24, 2014
The Arts Fuse
Know When to Fold ‘em — Colson Whitehead Explores “The Noble Hustle”
The Noble Hustle gives talented novelist Colson Whitehead an opportunity to spelunk in some of the gnarlier corners of the American dream, in this case the Tropicana in Atlantic City.
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July 14, 2014
The Arts Fuse
“Little Failure” — Gary Shteyngart’s Memoir is Amusing But Thin
Gary Shteyngart’s memoir proffers the rhetorical zest and caustic wit of his novels, but it lacks their satiric edge.
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June 16, 2014
The Arts Fuse
Commentary: Happy Bloomsday! – A High Holy Day for Readers
People complain about how no one takes literature seriously these days. Tell that to the millions of people who are participating in Bloomsday celebrations worldwide today, the day the novel takes place.
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May 15, 2014
The Arts Fuse
“A Place in the Country” — A Heady Tour of W.G. Sebald Country
It seems deeply appropriate that a superb book of essays by W.G. Sebald about his favorite writers should be his swan song.
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April 18, 2014
The Arts Fuse
Poetry Review: “Book of Hours” — From Mourning to Celebration
Kevin Young’s poetic line is generally on the concise side, generating a pithy, earthy, evocative quality that hovers somewhere between the haiku-like jazziness of Robert Creeley and the delta blues of Son House or Skip James.
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March 6, 2014
The Millions
Bird Lives: On Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning
I submit that the kind of place Parker holds within jazz tradition is a little like what you would get if you mixed Beethoven with Jimi Hendrix. He was a game changer.
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October 3, 2013
The Millions
The Life that Develops In-Between: On Elizabeth Graver’s The End of the Point
Unless you’re kicking it with the Compsons or Buendias, say, it usually takes a little bit of readerly patience to get through a multigenerational family story. One has to be on one’s game, in terms of care and attention. Nobody wants to spend several hundred pages with a bunch of allegorical figures sitting around the dinner table and passing each other the salt.
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November 18, 2011
The Millions
Mythology, Men, and Coonskin Caps: On Michael Wallis’s David Crockett
David Crockett was romanticized in the same way that classic film stars, athletes, and politicians are, and for a similar reason — the legend is inextricably entwined with the actual human being. Not only is there no urgency to demystify, there’s almost no reason to. Sometimes the legend and the person are inextricable for perfectly good reasons.
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August 22, 2011
The Millions
The Canon Guard: Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence
Harold Bloom is not so much the judicious patriarch or brazen egomaniac as he is a grandmother – endlessly harried, fiercely loving, and relentlessly worried about the future of his brood.
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August 30, 2010
The Millions
Panache to Burn: Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22
Though we have just now learned that Hitch is dying, delving into his memoir many things are apparent, not the least of which the fact that the man has done some living. If anyone has the right to consider his time not wasted, it’s him.
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April 7, 2008
Flak Magazine
Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg
“The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.”
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February 3, 2008
Flak Magazine
52 Projects by Jeffery Yamaguchi
You could see this type of book as either a refreshingly earnest and sweet-natured gesture, or a pathetic pile of saccharine corn and cheese, depending on your preferences and how pretentious you are.
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September 5, 2007
Flak Magazine
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
George Packer’s gripping and prosaic account of the political overture, military clash, and social aftermath of the Iraq War begins and expands beautifully from the title image outward.
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January 30, 2006
Flak Magazine
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
This is Wallace’s unique magic: to be totally erudite and obscenely well educated, yet not let any of it become pompous or pretentious or arrogant in any way. Using cerebral lingo to deepen and clarify, not cloud, his message is part of the charm.
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November 11, 2005
Flak Magazine
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie has always been a cultural prism: Indian-born, Oxford-educated, New York- residing. An avowed liberal secular internationalist, Rushdie is in a particularly strong position to write on what preoccupies us: terrorism, culture, religion, and love.
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October 4, 2005
Flak Magazine
One of the strongest and most sadly neglected creative writers of the New York Intellectuals.