When Macy introduced this month’s Book Club selection, “Stone Arabia,” she mentioned its focus on the ideas of memory, time, and art. For me, the thread stringing these themes together was authenticity (a sentiment shared by Alex Shephard over at Full Stop, who has a great Q. & A. with Dana Spiotta). Nik is a […]
Category Archives: Books
Reading List
Yesterday I stopped at a bookstore and found myself completely unable to remember the name of “The Curfew,” a novel reviewed in last week’s Brieflier Noted. “There’s a puppet? Or, like, maybe a kid? On the cover?” My awesome clues didn’t get the salespeople very far, and I walked out instead with “The Tiger’s Wife.” […]
Road Work
In 1947, Jack Kerouac took the first of three trips that would inform “On the Road,” the 1957 novel that defined the Beat movement. Recently, Penguin reissued the book as an “amplified edition,” and the app includes pages from Kerouac’s travel journals, letters between Kerouac and his editors, interactive maps of the 1947, 1949, and […]
British Reserves
Recently, the British Library announced its 19th Century Historical Collection app for the iPad, which features scanned copies of more than a thousand nineteenth-century books—all of which are in the public domain—and includes classic novels as well as works on philosophy, science, and history. Original maps and illustrations are highlighted, as are marginalia and inscriptions […]
First Words
Earlier this month, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute announced the completion of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the result of ninety years of research on the language and dialects of ancient Mesopotamia. The work’s basic language, Akkadian, dates to the twenty-fourth century B.C., and the twenty-one volumes—the first of which was published in 1956—function more […]
The Exchange: Arthur Phillips
“The Tragedy of Arthur,” a novel by Arthur Phillips, is a bold and tangled work in two acts. The first is a faux-memoir, in which Phillips’s father, also an Arthur Phillips, has discovered a previously unknown Shakespeare play, also called “The Tragedy of Arthur.” Arthur Sr.—who happens to be a convicted forger—enlists Phillips’s help in […]
A Tender Age
In her post introducing June’s Book Club selection, “House of Prayer No. 2,” by Mark Richard, Macy cites a passage that includes this sentence: Sometimes in the orange and grey dust when the world is empty, the child lies in the cold backyard grass and watches the thousand starlings swarm Dr. Jim’s chimneys, and the […]
Briefliest Noted
Sometimes, I just have nothing more to say here about my Brieflier Noted posts. What, I’m going to summarize a summary of a summary? That reminds me of my junior-year English class, in which we didn’t read great works of literature but instead read something called Masterplots, which, as far as I now can tell, […]
Lit Bits
Two weeks ago marked the launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an online cultural magazine founded on the belief that literary criticism can flourish on the Internet. “Contrary to the notion that the literary arts are dying off, we believe a reading renaissance is underway in America,” says the founding editor Tom Lutz, […]
Bye, Buy Brownstone
Remember when Lucy tells Charlie Brown that all she really wants for Christmas is real estate? I get it now. From this week’s Briefly Noted review of “The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn,” by Suleiman Osman: Today, Brooklyn real estate is among the most expensive and coveted in the nation. Read this week’s Brieflier Noted to […]