Tag
B-Sides
-
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.
-
B-Sides: Dambudzo Marechera’s “The House of Hunger”
Contemporary southern Africa is littered with the detritus of grand schemes—imperialism, apartheid, development, independence, socialism. Wrought first by colonial violence and then by anti-colonial movements gone bad, the wreckages of utopia heap up in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. The fallout of these schemes accumulates and compacts. Citizens find themselves making their lives on…
-
B-Sides: Celia Fremlin’s “The Hours Before Dawn”
As Celia Fremlin told it three decades after the fact, The Hours Before Dawn was written at night. Lurching around Hampstead Heath behind a stroller that …
-
B-Sides: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Farce
Anyone who has spent at least three hours in sole charge of two or more children has stories to tell, but few faculties left with which to tell them. Luckily, we have a …
-
B-Sides: Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood”
I first read it as a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio: sitting on a concrete wharf by Lake Erie with the interstate at my back; sitting on a bench in the hardwood forest of a …
-
B-Sides: Gustav Hasford’s “The Short-Timers”
The most persistent source of anguish in war stories may be the inability to tell them: the sense of a vast experiential and moral distance between the battlefield …
-
B-Sides: Charles Portis’s “Gringos”
Faithful readers of Charles Portis tend to be rabidly in love with his writing, but a little mystified by its potency. Like a retired Crown Vic Interceptor acquired …
-
B-Sides: Isherwood’s “Prater Violet”
Judging from his writing, Christopher Isherwood must have been an ideal guest at a dinner party: intelligent, witty …
-
B-Sides: John Galt’s “Annals of the Parish”
For 30 or 40 years a book has been lurking on my shelves, a beautiful little Everyman’s Library edition published by Dent and Dutton, undated, with red fake leather binding …
-
John Williams’s Perfect Anti-Western
Canyonlands National Park, Utah; 103ºF under a cloudless summer sky. I’d call the canyon floor below “bone-white,” if it looked like anything had ever lived there long enough to leave its bones behind. This is the part of the world where Edward Abbey (in his 1968 Desert Solitaire) said he came “to look at and…
