By The Firelight

Even in his late seventies, the Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov played tennis, jogged, smoked like a chimney, listened to jazz, dressed with a certain bohemian flavor, flirted with women, divided his life between sunny Biarritz and snobbish Moscow, and drove a car. It was in the car that he had a stroke, caused a minor accident and, since January of last year […]

There's a lot to agree with in Eric Obenauf's "print is alive" article in The Brooklyn Rail, even if none of his arguments strike me as novel. Nonetheless, this is a pretty good summation of why corporate publishing is in disarray: Such efforts expose a key fundamental flaw within the mindset of modern corporate publishing: the per […]

This is how Robert McCrumb sounds when he's in a tizzy: Which brings us to the larger question: whatever happened to that "Anglo-American dialogue" that Granta "in good conscience" no longer has time for? The short answer is that it actually went global about 20 years ago. Under the new management, readers of Granta will […]

Following up on my earlier post about Benjamin Moser’s forthcoming Lispector biography, Why This World, I want to correct some information about her available titles. In addition to all the New Directions ones I listed on the original post, Family Ties is also available from the University of Texas Press, and this fall, the UK based Haus Publishing will be […]

In the comment section of our most recent The Millions Top Ten post, I wrote that Olive Kitteridge, this year's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of linked short stories by Elizabeth Strout, was beautiful and moving, and that it caught me by surprise. What surprised me, I guess, was that I liked it at all. I'd only read it because because of a bo […]

Our newest review at TQC is Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. It's a pre-post-apocalypse novel: Ron Currie, Jr.’s second book, Everything Matters!, is an appropriate follow-up to his award-winning story collection God Is Dead. While the latter collects nine stories about a world fallen into chaos in the wake of God’s sudden death, the former is […]

Seth G. Jones, a RAND Corporation political scientist, zeroes in on what went awry in Afghanistan after America’s successful routing of the Taliban in late 2001.

Steve Hely’s satirical novel, “How I Became a Famous Novelist,” is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction.

Apologies to those of you that believe my covering the lengthy career of an author already selling I'd guess somewhere around 3,000 copies or so of his work somehow goes against the spirit of the Emerging Writers Network.  Silly me believing that I might have an understanding of what I've been doing with the EWN for the past decade.Anyway, while I […]

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia by James Palmer, a review from New York Review of Books by Anne Applebaum.

Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a review from American Scientist by William McGrew.