Friday, May 24, 2013
Quick: What’s the most unforgivable sin a writer can commit in fiction? A writerly crime so awful that major, award-winning novelists are condemning it on the pages of Publishers Weekly and inveighing against it in The New Yorker? …
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Portland, Maine — U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe describes a scene out of a Rockwell painting: With Washington crippled by a blizzard, President Obama worked the week before Christmas with a fire roaring in the fireplace in the Oval …
Sunday, May 19, 2013
The Slate Book Review presents Patti Smith’s introduction to Astragal , the 1965 novel by Albertine Sarrazin, which is being reprinted this month by New Directions. New York — Perhaps it is wrong to speak of oneself while …
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Whether you feast on truffles or Cheetos, the end result is the same. Defecation is the great leveler. There’s nothing more democratic or unpretentious than what happens in the confines of our commodes — as the children’s book …
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Washington — Isabel Allende has a cold. Bronchitis, actually. She’s normally a hugger. Not today. “Don’t touch me,” she warns, thrusting her arms up to avoid the slightest possibility of skin-to-skin contact. “I’m all germs.” It’s Wednesday and …
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Karen Speerstra’s home is in the farthest southwest corner of Tunbridge, about as high as you can get on Kelsey Mountain without being a bird. The dirt road to her house keeps narrowing as it nears the top …
Friday, May 10, 2013
If you’re a drug dealer, a drunk, a crook, a phoney, a bully, a racist, a snob or a ditz you might want to go see The Great Gatsby, because the characters in the movie are your people. …
Friday, May 10, 2013
My wife and I are just back from a week and some in the Netherlands, which we spent mostly in Amsterdam, with time out for a couple of glorious days bicycling on the island of Texel. Bicycles are everywhere in that country, which partly explains, no doubt, why …
Friday, May 10, 2013
Like the Civil War, whose origins, outcome and meaning are still vigorously debated, how we remember the Vietnam War is inextricably tangled with what our political views of it are. If you believe that the war shouldn’t have …
Sunday, May 5, 2013
The term egghead has mostly been retired to the Hall of Lost Insults, hung up alongside Poindexter and gomer in the “Making Fun of Nerds” section. But being accused of being an “egghead” in the 1950s wasn’t the …