Tag
B-Sides
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B-Sides: Albert O. Hirschman’s “The Passions and the Interests”
“The Passions and the Interests” charms the reader as it persuades. Much of that charm is about its content as well as its style.
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B-Sides: Reading, Race, and “Robert’s Rules of Order”
The famous guidebook of rules, motions, and meetings has a darker history than you might think.
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B-Sides: Juan José Saer’s “The Investigation”
How to catch a killer who only exists in a parallel world?
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B-Sides: J. G. Farrell’s “Troubles”
His characters—in 1919 Ireland, 1857 India, and 1940 Singapore—intuit that the world is about to collapse. But they can do nothing to save it.
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B-Sides: Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel”
Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel” allows us to have our nostalgic cake and read it too.
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B-Sides: Jesmyn Ward’s “Where the Line Bleeds”
Novelist Jesmyn Ward is known for historical grandiosity, but her long-overlooked book “Sing, Unburied, Sing” turns away from realism into the realm of generic strangeness.
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B-Sides: Lucy R. Lippard’s “I See/You Mean”
“Few libraries list it among their holdings, and sometimes I have wondered if the book in my possession actually exists.”
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B-Sides: John Keene’s “Annotations”
Annotations isn’t a book you read for the plot. It’s more of a “Notes toward…” that remains just that: always towards, never quite arriving.
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B-Sides: Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasures”
South African literature has long struggled to become drought-resistant: its plotlines, and even its paper production, presuppose abundant water.[none-for-homepage]
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B-Sides: Geoff Park’s “Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life”
Environmental wisdom can arise from being a better reader.
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B-Sides: Virginia Woolf’s “Flush”
Woolf’s spin on the genre of children’s fiction about animals is valuable because of its comedy, not despite it.
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B-Sides: Jessica Anderson’s “The Impersonators”
A 1980 novel brilliantly anatomizes the Australian settler-colonial roots of the late 20th century’s crass materialist complacency.[none-for-homepage]
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B-Sides: Latife Tekin’s “Berji Kristin”
As in mythology, the characters in a 1984 Turkish novel are acted upon by forces distant and uncaring.
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B-Sides: Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”
When freedom will not arrive to us, can we get nearer to it?
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B-Sides: Mary Butts’s “Armed with Madness”
The author’s pagan obsessions, like her chatty metacritiques of other modernist writers, set her apart from her contemporaries.
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B-Sides: Brecht Evens’s “The Making Of”
How could any Belgian graphic novel escape Tintin’s shadow? Enter Brecht Evens’s The Making Of.
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B-Sides: Louis Bromfield’s “Pleasant Valley”
“What I wanted was a piece of land which I could love passionately, which I could spend the rest of my life in cultivating.”
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B-Sides: Mary Borden’s “The Forbidden Zone”
Mary Borden’s taut masterpiece has long been overshadowed by the other Great War books of 1928–29 (All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms …
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B-Sides: Gene Stratton-Porter’s “A Girl of the Limberlost”
All but forgotten today, Gene Stratton-Porter was—in the early 20th century …
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B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over …
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B-Sides: Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”
The July 1960 issue of Esquire—dedicated to New York City—included …
