Most of the Teachers are Monsters
The other day I wrote a post over at PWHNY about my older son’s interest in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series in anticipation of the the release of the film adaptation of the first novel, The Lightning Thief, this week. I’ve now started reading the...Schama’s America
I’ve just started reading Simon Schama’s latest book, The American Future: A History, which arrived today from amazon.co.uk. I got interested in the book when a friend sent me this a link to a review of the book by Niall Ferguson in the Financial Times....Schlesinger and Obama
As I complete the revisions to my manuscript on emergent literatures for NYU Press, I’ve been rereading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, originally published in 1992...Jinxing It, Part 2: Foreskin’s Lament
My wife says that jinxing works in only one direction because bad fortune is simply more frequent and more powerful than good fortune. The writer Shalom Auslander has a different explanation. In his recently published memoir Foreskin’s Lament (2007), Auslander...Mysteries of Pittsburgh
I’ve just finished reading Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which I started a couple of weeks ago because 1) I loved his breakthrough novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and enjoyed his...