Civic Virtues
George Scialabba
A new collection of Gore Vidal's essays showcases five decades of literary and political criticism, with his mocking, disenchanted patriotism in all its eloquence.
Essays
2008
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Windows Into the Night
Marcela Valdes : Non-Fiction
The collected nonfiction of Roberto Bolaño is a treasure trove filled with straw and dust, jewels and gold.
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New Old Things
Frances Richard : Non-Fiction
A new collection of short pieces by the prodigious and wide-ranging critic Luc Sante doubles as a history of Modernism's outlaws.
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A Great Deal of Work
George Scialabba : Non-Fiction
Edmund Wilson's politics have long been criticized, but his views were more nuanced than you might think.
2007
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In Our Orbit
Edward Said's musical predilections capture the full complexity of the master theorist.
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Playtime
The Surrealist dissident Raymond Queneau turned his writings into a lab for his experiments, and the results are still exhilarating.
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Cafe Society
William Deresiewicz : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Clive James's erudite new collection of essays celebrates the best of twentieth-century art, thought and politics.
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The Restless Mind
Jeremy Harding : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag's posthumous collection of essays and speeches, reveals her rapt attention to the world around her.
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The Book of Questions
William Deresiewicz : Literacy & Reading
In a book-length essay on the novel, Milan Kundera foresees the curtain of literary history drawing to a close.
2006
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The Essential Terrorist
With the "war on terror" now official nomenclature, the problematic conflating of ethnic, religious and "terrorist" identities is now a matter of policy as well as media distortion. In a 1986 book review, Edward Said argues presciently against the dangerous "terrorism craze"--"dangerous because it consolidates the immense, unrestrained pseudopatriotic narcissism we are nourishing."
2005
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Wartime Lies
Timothy Snyder : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
As Nazis dropped bombs in Warsaw, poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote a collection of literary criticism that sought to trace the rise of totalitarianism by deconstructing the mythologies of Western modernity.
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Marxism and Form
Perry Anderson's Spectrum journeys through the abstract worlds of conservative and liberal intellectual thought, and leaves in its trail insights on the substance and style of ideas.
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How Art Can Save Your Life
Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa is a celebration of the intersection between art and life and the random genius of the unexpected.
2003
This week: Imagining a new new deal, with Howard Zinn, Frances Moore Lappe, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Eric Schlosser and...FDR himself. Plus: Ennis Carter and Stephen Duncombe on the political propaganda legacy of the WPA. (13mb mp3)
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