The New York Review of Books

February 21st 2013

On February 5, The New York Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an evening at Town Hall in New York City. Before a packed crowd of 1,400 people, editor Robert Silvers introduced John Banville, Mary Beard, Michael Chabon, Mark Danner, Joan Didion, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Darryl Pinckney, who read from their past work in the Review and spoke about their relationship with the magazine, and its influence on their careers.

We’re pleased to present some highlights from the event, with photos by Beowulf Sheehan.

Posted at 3:55pm and tagged with: John Banville, Mary Beard, Michael Chabon, Mark Danner, Joan Didion, Daniel Mendelsohn, Darryl Pinckney, reading, lit, Town Hall,.

September 19th 2012

Frederick Seidel — Moto Poeta

5 notes |#

469 plays

In memory of Stephen A. Aaron (1936–2012)

You were the loudest of us all by far,
And the sweetest behind your fear,
Brilliant expositor of Arthur Miller and Shakespeare.
There you are at the beginning of your career

Bellowing like a carny barker
In the Freshman Commons, selling tickets to some
HDC production with your tuba voice and bigger nose.
The stylish fellows like myself were appalled…

Moto Poeta by Frederick Seidel

Posted at 3:55pm and tagged with: frederick seidel, new york review of books, poetry, audio, reading,.

September 6th 2012

25 notes |#

Happy National Read a Book Day. Celebrate by pulling up a chair and enjoying a good book.

Posted at 2:45pm and tagged with: National Read a Book Day, lit, reading, bookshelf,.

July 7th 2012

Summer Reading, by John Ashbery

12 notes |#

With these lighter days a concomitant
urge to scrutiny arrives. Signing in,
my motivation palls, pusillanimous.
Are we to take it inside the house?
I have to go.

Tell me another dream. The long events surface
wider, farther apart, like autumn breakers.
Birds are suddenly there. The house of cards
on sand falters, fatally. I’m elated.

You never know how things work out
except through “sleight” of hand, sometimes.
I’m worried about knowing later.
The high-school principal killed his star student,

for instance. Feeling competent,
they quashed him. Until he wins the crisis
we can’t promote it. Keep that rodent away.
What have you seemed to do?

Do interesting things well done and may
spring chasten you. We had everything in mind.
Everything softballed, wound up on my back porch.
It’s okay, though. Keep us on your docket. Cut through the…

© John Ashbery, from the October 9, 2008 issue of The New York Review of Books. Ashbery reads this and other poems in a 2009 podcast.

Posted at 11:00am and tagged with: John Ashbery, poetry, poems, lit, summer, reading, one column,.

March 29th 2012

13 notes |#

Tim Parks, Do We Need Stories?

Posted at 4:44pm and tagged with: Tim Parks, Jonathan Franzen, lit, writing, literature, novels, self, God, reading,.

“

Let’s tackle one of the literary set’s favorite orthodoxies head on: that the world “needs stories.” There is an enormous need,” Jonathan Franzen declares in an interview with Corriere della Sera (there’s no escape these days), “for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter.” What is the nature of this need? What would happen if it wasn’t met? We might also ask: why does Franzen refer to complex stories? And why is it important not to be interrupted by Twitter and Facebook? Are such interruptions any worse than an old land line phone call, or simply friends and family buzzing around your writing table? Jane Austen, we recall, loved to write in domestic spaces where she was open to constant interruption.

”

March 13th 2012

19 notes |#

Tim Parks, Why Finish Books?

Posted at 4:14pm and tagged with: lit, literature, reading, writing, novels, Tim Parks, books,.

“

Do we need to finish books? Is a good book by definition one that we did finish? Or are there occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end, or even only half way through, and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it? I ask the question because this is happening to me more and more often. Is it age, wisdom, senility? I start a book. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I’ve had enough. It’s not that I’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m not bored, I don’t even think it’s too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it. Can I say then that I’ve read it? Can I recommend it to others and speak of it as a fine book?

”

February 15th 2012

15 notes |#

Tim Parks, E-books Can’t Burn

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Photo: Jacqueline Rush Lee, Little Red Book (Devotion Series), 2008

Posted at 5:16pm and tagged with: lit, books, reading, e-books, ebooks, Kindle, Tim Parks, literature,.

Tim Parks, E-books Can’t Burn

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Photo: Jacqueline Rush Lee, Little Red Book (Devotion Series), 2008

November 5th 2011

27 notes |#

Charles Simic, Was King Hammurabi a Commie?

Posted at 10:42am and tagged with: Occupy Wall Street, Hammurabi, Charles Simic, Chekhov, reading,.

“

Nothing ever changes” may be one of the truest things ever said. Certainly, life was different when our grandparents were young, in many ways far worse and in other ways far better—as they never failed to inform us every time some new, faddish invention came along. But despite all the predictions of social reformers and utopian thinkers, human behavior seems to have remained pretty much the same throughout recorded history. The four-thousand-year old admonition in the Code of Hammurabi that the strong be prevented from oppressing the weak, or Thomas Moore’s observation in the sixteenth century that society was a conspiracy of the rich to defraud the poor, are not only perfectly understandable today, but are aimed at the same problem that has brought demonstrators to the streets from Wall Street to Oakland. You’d think that the outsourcing of millions of jobs, the taking of away people’s homes, the stealing of their pensions, and the making of fortunes out of their tragedies would make Americans remember their family’s histories, the fact that so many of us started off as poor or persecuted. But, obviously, that’s not the case. It’s because we remember so little and prefer to be told fairy tales about our nation’s past that nothing ever fundamentally changes with us.

”

October 27th 2011

Frederick Seidel — Back Then

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439 plays

Negroes walking the white streets
Was how it seemed on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
One morning in 1971 it began.
I converted so to speak on the spot to the Ku Klux Klan.

Back Then by Frederick Seidel

Posted at 11:13am and tagged with: Frederick Seidel, poetry, The New York Review of Books, audio, reading,.

June 10th 2011

3 notes |#

Sue Halpern, Reading in the Cloud

Publishers have long aggregated sales figures and used them in a preemptory way to tell a writer, for example, that “books on women chemists don’t sell,” but they’ve never had more information at their disposal than they do now—and soon they will have more. To what end is not yet clear.

Posted at 9:45am and tagged with: iCloud, books, lit, reading, Apple, 24Symbols, Internet,.

Sue Halpern, Reading in the Cloud

Publishers have long aggregated sales figures and used them in a preemptory way to tell a writer, for example, that “books on women chemists don’t sell,” but they’ve never had more information at their disposal than they do now—and soon they will have more. To what end is not yet clear.

May 18th 2011

187 notes |#

Charles Simic, A Country Without Libraries

I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside. Like many other Americans of my generation, I owe much of my knowledge to thousands of books I withdrew from public libraries over a lifetime. I remember the sense of awe I felt as a teenager when I realized I could roam among the shelves, take down any book I wanted, examine it at my leisure at one of the library tables, and if it struck my fancy, bring it home.

Photo: Hartland Four Corners, Vermont, 1994. Robert Dawson’s photos of libraries are currently on view in the exhibition Public Library: An American Commons at the San Francisco Public Library.

Posted at 10:15am and tagged with: lit, books, libraries, Charles Simic, reading,.

Charles Simic, A Country Without Libraries

I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside. Like many other Americans of my generation, I owe much of my knowledge to thousands of books I withdrew from public libraries over a lifetime. I remember the sense of awe I felt as a teenager when I realized I could roam among the shelves, take down any book I wanted, examine it at my leisure at one of the library tables, and if it struck my fancy, bring it home.

Photo: Hartland Four Corners, Vermont, 1994. Robert Dawson’s photos of libraries are currently on view in the exhibition Public Library: An American Commons at the San Francisco Public Library.