The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer
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A collection of nonfiction pieces from Geoff Dyer.
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The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate
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A great trilogy of American essays concludes with the modern era.
Read MoreA Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
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George Saunders brings his short story masterclass to general readers with this book of his commentary on Russian classics.
Read MoreHomo Irrealis by André Aciman
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A collection of essays by the author of “Call Me By Your Name.”
Read MoreThin Places by Jordan Kisner
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A debut collection of essays exploring the places where two worlds touch.
Read MoreThe Suburb and the Sword: James Clavell’s Shogun as a Guide to Manhood
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Steve Danziger on feudalist Japan vs. contemporary Marlboro.
Read MoreThink, Write, Speak by Vladimir Nabokov
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A meticulously contextualized volume just brimming with supporting information.
Read MoreCoventry: Essays by Rachel Cusk
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Cusk’s essays create her own roadmap to making sense of her intentional disbelief both in her life and in her stories.
Read MoreThe Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Robert Kirk
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There’s a deep, humanist value to be found in Kirk’s investigations.
Read MoreWhite by Bret Easton Ellis
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If Ellis is obsessed with anything as a craftsman, it’s voice.
Read MoreThe End of the End of the Earth: Essays by Jonathan Franzen
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Communicates a compelling voice from a speaker who’s well-intentioned, well-studied and considerate, but hopelessly aloof.
Read MoreThe Tools We Need
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The panic that arose across the country as the incredible reality of a Trump presidency began to sink in hit the book world with particular force. In his temperament, style and values, the new president seems almost purpose-built to oppose everything Barack Obama has stood for and accomplished. (The only things they appear to have in common are a love of golf and an on again-off again friendship with Hillary Clinton.) In few aspects is the gulf wider than in their respective attitudes to reading.
Read MoreMarilynne Robinson's Psalms and Prophecy
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Marilynne Robinson began her novel Housekeeping while completing a dissertation on Shakespeare as a graduate student. Initially she wrote what now form the book’s preliminary scenes as exercises in extended metaphors. Evoking her childhood home of Sandpoint, Idaho, a lake town in the panhandle of the state (in the book she renames it Fingerbone) and remotely drawing off her ancestors, Robinson simply wanted to see if she could still write something other than scholastic essays. Also, she has said, she wanted to impress her friends.
Read MoreAbsent Friends: It wasn't what he wanted
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As Charles Homer Haskins pointed out in his humbly durable masterpiece The Renaissance of the 12th Century, the Dark Ages weren’t dark at all. Fiercely cold most of the time (due to a bout of climate change), but not dark in the sense of shuttered. Beknighted, but not benighted.
The great scholar John Addington Symonds (whose absence from bookstore shelves bloody well qualifies him for honoring here in Absent Friends, somewhere down the line) put it very prettily when he observed that any age without Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael must necessarily seem dark. The ostentatious showboating of the Italian Renaissance is the problem in a nutshell when it comes to thinking about the innocent ages that come before.
Read MoreChilde Harold's Children
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F. Scott Fitzgerald could never quite get over his youth. He had managed so fully to take part in its opportunities that everything in adulthood savored of anticlimax. From his first days at Princeton—“the best country club in the world”—to the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, he experienced everything that custom entitles young people to experience, no matter how stupid or ridiculous it may be.
Read MoreThe Poison Tree
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The hardest thing about watching Norman Mailer reprise his public role as a loudmouthed buffoon is seeing the damage his performance has done to his newest novel, The Castle in the Forest. Mailer has been taking the stage in this part for, it is hard to believe, sixty years, since the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948. For sixty years he’s been bullying his way to the front of the proscenium and bellowing forth one self-indulgent diatribe after another. For sixty years he’s been picking fights and manufacturing front-page vendettas, refusing to allow a single cultural phenomenon to pass without weighing in, in terms sufficiently coarse and supercilious to somehow make every spectacle in part about him—and rather conveniently timing these irruptions to coincide with the publication of a new book.
Read MoreShall we in that great night rejoice?
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‘But hush, for I have lost the theme. . .'
A party of young people takes advantage of a beautiful blue-sky spring afternoon to have a picnic. The men are all trim and waistcoated, the women wear their hair in shapely turrets, with long white gloves on their hands. Baskets of fruit, an ice-bucket filled with bottles of sweet wine, and platters of coldcuts weight the picnic blanket. The air is clear and the nearby trees are gently swaying. The talk is quicksilver, invigorating.
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