The American Museum of Natural History was occupied by writers, editors, and agents on Tuesday night, April 28, for the PEN Foundation’s annual black-tie gala.
During the pre-dinner cocktail hour in the museum’s spacious rotunda, Norton editor Bob Weil said softly that he hoped the big dinosaur skeleton mounted in the middle of the room Read More
Compiled as testament to the “belief in the story as a system of knowledge,” E.L. Doctorow’s book of essays provides a superb overview both of American literature and of the themes the author has taken up over his long and prolific career. Like his earlier collection, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993), this gathering Read More
Compiled as testament to the “belief in the story as a system of knowledge,” E.L. Doctorow’s book of essays provides a superb overview both of American literature and of the themes the author has taken up over his long and prolific career. Like his earlier collection, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (1993), this gathering Read More
For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? He’s been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its tropes who often seems like a droll, finger-snapping ringmaster guiding his adroit innovations past literary statuary, picking up prizes, yet never entering Read More
A great blessing in life is that most people can get used to anything. And a great curse in life is that most people can get used to anything. At home and on the battlefield, the most peaceful, decent men and women get used to war.
At one point in E.L. Doctorow’s brilliant and compulsively Read More
City of God , by E.L. Doctorow. Random House, 272 pages, $25.
Is it possible to capture the human condition in 270 pages? In City of God , his 10th work of fiction, E.L. Doctorow gives it a try.
City of God has many voices and many time frames. It has poetry, Holocaust memoir Read More
My grandmother’s third or fifth husband, depending on whether he or she gave you the count, was a brilliant underachiever in the immigrant Jewish tradition. Frederick Bridge graduated at or near the top of his class at Columbia and then the College of Physicians and Surgeons, but in life he always chose duty over distinction. Read More
