Search PYM:
Subscribe via Reader
Subscribe via RSS
-
Sponsors
Recent Comments
-
Recent Posts
Categories
Archives
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- December 2010
- June 2010
Tags!
2012 abortion baseball centrism conservatism debt deficit democrats economics Faux News Foreign Policy Fox News gay marriage GOP health care history hockey israel journalism libya medicare michele bachmann mitt romney new jersey newt gingrich New York Giants new york times nhl obama Osama Bin Laden paul krugman paul ryan politics polling President Obama public opinion racism republicans rick perry romney sarah palin taxation Taxes tea party tmitartnSearch the web:
Category Archives: Books
Book Miscellanea
1) The New York Times is celebrating “A Century of Proust.” 2) NYRB reviews Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life by Jonathan Sperber. 3) Over the weekend, I finished John Le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor. While it doesn’t compare to … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Leave a comment
The Play’s the Thing
The American Scholar has a fascinating article on Abraham Lincoln and his appreciation of the plays of William Shakespeare. Here’s an excerpt: After Hackett performed before the president, he sent Lincoln a copy of a book he had just published, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, History
Leave a comment
Time of the Season
Writing in the London Review of Books, John Lanchester considers the popular appeal of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (Note: while the excerpt below contains no real spoilers, the linked article contains many): So the … Continue reading
Posted in Books
3 Comments
Scamming Nabokov
Edward Jay Epstein recalls taking a college European Lit course taught by none other than Vladimir Nabokov: Unfortunately, distracted by the gorges, lakes, movie houses, corridor dates, and other more local enchantments of Ithaca, I did not get around to … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Leave a comment
Beginnings XII
Famed Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has passed away. He is most well known for his novel Things Fall Apart. Achebe has described the novel as a response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Here’s how it begins: Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages … Continue reading
Posted in Books
4 Comments
What Might Have Been?
Jack Kerouac once asked Marlon Brando to make On the Road into a movie: Kerouac was susceptible to film—a sucker for its promise of riches as well as its flickering poetry—and he imagined an iconic adaptation of On the Road. Not … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Movies
Leave a comment
Posthumously Prolific
British writer/poet Rudyard Kipling died in 1936, but it took until 2013 for us to get a look at fifty of his “lost” poems: Kipling scholars are celebrating the publication of lost poems by the author whose exhortations in “If” … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Music
Leave a comment
Dostoevsky on Television
(via the Daily Dish) Over at First Things, Helen Rittelmeyer posits that the characters on the television show Arrested Development were modeled after, or at least inspired by, the characters in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Here’s an excerpt where she compares G.O.B. to Dmitri … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Television
Leave a comment
Middles I
Here is a brief passage from early on in John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, after Kino has just found a pearl so enormous and valuable that he has declared his family’s life is changed forever. These two paragraphs convey the truth … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Fun
3 Comments
Unprepared for Class
Likely many more Americans have watched the episode of Seinfeld where George’s father-in-law to-be is revealed to have had a homosexual relationship with John Cheever than have ever read any of Cheever’s stories. Writing in The New York Review of … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Leave a comment
What Would Vonnegut Do
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece,Slaughterhouse Five, was his attempt to grapple with the horrors of WWII, and specifically his time as a prisoner of war and a witness to the firebombing of Dresden while serving in the US Army. Decades later, when the military … Continue reading
Posted in Books, History
Leave a comment
Beginnings XI
Don Delillo’s Underworld entertains the proposition that Bobby Thompson’s game winning home run off of Ralph Branca to win the 1951 pennant really was a “shot heard round the world.” The sixty page opening takes the reader through the day … Continue reading
Posted in Baseball, Books, News and Current Events
3 Comments
A Public Exchange About the Public Library
In June of 2012, Robern Darnton, a trustee of the New York Public Library, took to the New York Review of Books to defend announced changes to the city library system, including the closure of two midtown libraries, and renovations to … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Leave a comment
Rushdie Reflections
Author Salman Rushdie has published a memoir, called Joseph Anton, and has been all over the news as he promotes the book. Many are noting certain parallels between the way Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was greeted by fundamentalist Muslims … Continue reading
Posted in Books, News and Current Events, Religion
Leave a comment
Three Lists
The Library of Congress has a new exhibit called Books That Shaped America, which identifies 88 books that “have had a profound effect on American life.” It’s a rare list indeed that manages to incorporate The Great Gatsby, The Joy … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Football, Fun, Music
Leave a comment
Have you read F.Scott’s Latest?
F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may have been recognized as a masterpiece upon publication in 1925, but that didn’t mean an end to his struggles as an author. Fitzgerald’s later novels and stories were far less appreciated, and Fitzgerald was eventually reduced … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Leave a comment
Signifying Nothing (now with color)
I’ve tried on two separate occasions to read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and failed in both attempts. For those unfamiliar with the book, it describes the same few days in the life of a family, but from different … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Leave a comment
No Time to Read?
As I mentioned in a prior post, I have been working my way through Edmund Morris’ three-part biography of Theodore Roosevelt. I am just about finished with the first of the three books and it is wonderful. Roosevelt’s boundless energy – … Continue reading
