The amygdala is a region of the temporal lobe of most vertebrate brains that acts as a gatekeeper to the long-term memory, assigning priority to memories on the basis of the emotional intensity that accompanies them and in the process molding our emotional reflexes. Anyone who has been in combat or a car accident or Read More
Where most authors’ shelves are lined with books, a wall in Jonathan Baumbach’s living room is devoted entirely to videocassettes, many of them bootlegged copies with yellowed, handwritten labels. An occasional film critic–for such outlets as the now defunct Partisan Review–Mr. Baumbach is best known for his fiction and is often grouped with postmodernists like Read More
Dogs have been a part of Western literature ever since Argos expired at the sight of his returning master, Odysseus. But very few writers have been as associated with their mutts as J.R. (“Joe”) Ackerley. True, Ackerley, who died in 1967, was known for many memorable things during his life: He was a highly revered Read More
The title of John Szwed’s objective, detailed, above all loving biography of Alan Lomax, The Man Who Recorded the World (Viking, 448 pages, $29.95), is hardly an understatement. For a majority of his life, Lomax traveled the world looking for musicians to match the intensity of the prewar recordings of Robert Johnson that so enthralled Read More
No one reads poetry. If you are a poet or poetry critic (odds are, if you’re one, you’re the other) and are not thoroughly sick of this topic, there is probably something wrong with your brain that prevents you from experiencing boredom. You should give up poetry and become an astronaut. But now comes David Read More
When Philip Connors–whose first book, Fire Season (Ecco, 246 pages, $24.99), about his job as a fire lookout on a mountaintop in New Mexico, arrives this month–applied for a job at The Wall Street Journal in 1999, he was asked to send along six clips of his work. The problem was, his best piece, an Read More
In Boston, seven or eight years ago, after a reading Geoff Dyer gave to promote his Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, a collection of travel essays whose ethos is best encapsulated by the Bhagavad Gita’s claim that wise is the man who finds “action in inaction,” I dined with Mr. Read More
In 1978, when People wanted to interview Susan Sontag, the writer wondered aloud how Samuel Beckett might respond given the same opportunity. It was not unusual for her to invoke Beckett in this way. “When she worried she was making too many compromises,” Sigrid Nunez recalls in Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (Atlas, Read More
Let’s get one thing straight: You are the market. Or maybe your friends are. Or maybe your little sister who is a junior at N.Y.U., or the guests at that dinner party last Thursday, maybe they are, too. You are all the market. We are the market.
The market in question–the global cocaine market–is one Read More
A young-adult novel is like porn: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
Deep in the oddly innocent pages of The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht (Random House, 352 pages, $25), I found myself wondering why it all felt so familiar. The heroine’s succession of clear-cut quests, her earnest determination to Read More
