If you ask me to name the three best things Woody Allen ever did, I’ll name Annie Hall, Husbands and Wives, and his first book, Getting Even. The title of this surprising little paperback evokes a repressed intellectual working out his anxiety of influence against the literary canon with a Jackson Pollock-esque hysteria. He’s getting even with Dostoevsky, with Sartre, with Heidegger, with Joyce, with Kafka, and doing so with all the dignity of Jerry Lewis in a science lab. I …

I’m back from vacation, having not looked at a New York Times for exactly one week, and I find the New York Mets still ahead of the Atlanta Braves (good), Dick Cheney still alive (no comment), and the rest of the world generally in the same lousy shape it was when I left it. I had a chance to contemplate life’s big issues out on the beaches of Long Island, though, and I got into a few enlightening political discussions with family members of …

So, a month ago, I wrote a post, To Begin at the Beginning, which was about great opening lines (and also, apparently, proof that I love Pat Robertson), and I always meant to follow it up with the obvious corrollary: great closing lines. When I think of my favorite book endings, one of the first ones I think of is the last paragraph of On the Road:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier …

– Meatpaper. “Meatpaper is a print magazine of art and ideas about meat. We like metaphors more than marinating tips. We are your journal of meat culture.” I dunno. It’s a magazine. About meat.

– In other periodical news, the publisher of Weekly World News, everybody’s favorite fake tabloid to browse in the supermarket checkout (we have to stay on top of reports of alien babies in the White House!) will stop printing the print edition and move to an …

Hello, boys and girls. It’s your friendly neighborhood Jamelah here this week to make sure that while Levi is away on vacation, nobody sets fire to the couch. Oh, and also, I’m going to write some things. So on all counts, I’m sure we can all agree that it’s going to be an exciting time.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything here; I’ve taken the time off to do some other things, which means that I’ve mostly been holed up in my …

Sometimes the New York Times Book Review deserves a whole lot of praise, and when this happens I’m not going to skimp on the positive reinforcement. This weekend’s issue contains plenty of brain food, including a solid endpaper on American philosopher Richard Rorty, whose death last month occasioned numerous articles by people who seemed to have never read a word he wrote (and could thus only refer to him as “influential” or “highly regarded”). Thankfully, James Ryerson actually takes the trouble to …

Homefront by Kristen J. Tsetsi

If there’s a war on (and, these days, there’s usually a war on), I want to be reading about it. I appreciate first person accounts, either fictionalized or not, and Kristen Tsetsi’s Homefront, an emotional novel about a young married couple’s separation when husband Jake is shipped to Iraq, is a worthy new entry in this category.

What I like about this book is the narrator’s stark voice, fervently moody and explosive as she hunts for news of her …

Preliminaries and Midnight Convoy and Other Stories by S. Yizhar

Until a package from Toby Press showed up in my mail, I didn’t even know there was a legendary Hebrew language experimental novelist named S. Yizhar who once wrote “the longest work written in stream of consciousness modality in any language”. I’m sure I read the news item when the nearly nonagenarian author died last year, but it wasn’t until I looked at these new volumes that I felt a sense of this …

It’s a funny thing that when I write articles about book pricing inanities that plague our publishing industry, readers invariably think I’m just blowing off steam. They tell me how awful it is that I can’t afford the books I want to read, and they ask if I live near a library, or they offer to buy me books, or they tell me about obscure used bookshops where I can find great bargains. I guess they consider it beyond the …

Colin Thubron, the dean of British travel writers, would hate being called the dean of anything.

Thus begins Lorraine Adams’ New York Times Book Review cover piece on Shadow of the Silk Road, a book about the ancient mercantile route that once connected China to Afghanistan. I hate hearing a writer called “the dean” of anything too, but there aren’t too many other trite moments in this generally engaging review that touches on the most significant points in this book (such as why the …