The easy joke would be to say that since I wrote a novel last November it killed off John Barth, but that’s too glib a line to honor a preternatural…
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Two Perspectives on Thomas Mann and his Translator: Mrs. Lowe-Porter by Jo Salas and The Magician by Colm Tóbín
Jackleg | Scribner Essay by Jinny Webber Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize-winner for literature in 1929, is the magician of Colm Tóbín’s novel. In his review in this journal, David Starkey…
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray
Picador Review by Walter Cummins As I read John Gray’s Feline Philosophy, I couldn’t help thinking of the concluding lines of Archibald McLeish’s “Ars Poetica”—“A poem should not mean / But…
Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House by Katerina Stoykova
Kentucky Review by H. L. Hix Immigration is a pressing public policy issue. Millions worldwide are fleeing conditions of grave danger or extreme hardship in one country for conditions they…
Erasure and American Fiction: Percival Everett in Fiction and Film
Graywolf Press | Orion Pictures Essay by Walter Cummins Is if fair to compare a book and its movie version? A friend who was a Hollywood writer argues that they…
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Doubleday Review by Walter Cummins Meghan O’Gieblyn opens and closes God, Human, Animal, Machine with detailed descriptions of her meaningful relationships with beings—in effect, machines— that were the creations of…
The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell
Harper One Review by George Yatchisin You know you’re in great authorial hands when on page two of this book Evelyn McDonnell insists about her subject Joan Didion, “Narrative was…
Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Norton Review by Walter Cummins You probably haven’t realized it, but at this very moment you’re reading intellectual property (IP). It’s a new concept to me too. I’ve been writing…
Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel, Edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
Harper Reviewed by Walter Cummins Although the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020 didn’t turn out to be nearly as bad as the 14th century European Black Death, in the midst of…
The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore
Scribner Review by George Yatchisin How unreasonable, the Age of Reason, especially for an illiterate—if wildly, imaginatively thoughtful—peasant. A.K. Blakemore’s new novel The Glutton might be based on a wisp…