Word: bookã
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sure, you read—you might even do it quite often. But what you probably do when you “read” a book these days is to skim through it, skip around chapters when you can, and hunt for the book??s key ideas before moving on to the next title on your list. And while time constraints and a general unwillingness to expend intellectual energy are certainly not conducive to thorough reading, let me suggest that the reason you haven’t really read a book since, say, the eighth grade...
Miller uses one entry as a metaphor for the book??s endeavor to engage with readers by honestly portraying what has been important to American literary history over the past five centuries. The essay compares “Yankee Doodle” to “The Star Spangled Banner,” the former which she describes as representative of an American impulse and the latter as an attempt to aspire to the seriousness of European heritage. “Only focusing on Longfellow, Whitman, Fitzgerald, and the litany of familiar figures...
...says Lawrence Buell, Professor of American Literature, who contributed an entry on Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement. Citing the price as an investment the individual customer would not perhaps make, he explains, “I’m not trying to sound critical of what the book??s attempting here, by any means. There’s definitely a market in the world for good reference works, but it’s typically an institutional market rather than an individual market...
...book??s final pages, the lines between Kemal, the narrator, and the “real” Pamuk blur to the point of indistinguishability—all three men come to seem interchangeable with each other, as well as with any of the narrators in Pamuk’s other books. These tiny, invisible connections unspool gradually to spin out a place both intricate and familiar, the nostalgia-saturated inverse of the fast-paced modern city: turning the first few pages of the “Innocence” feels like nothing more than coming home...
...what if Prospero is a deceiver? A usurper? A false sovereign, like Macbeth? Philip Roth’s latest novel, “The Humbling,” suggests the synthesis of these two roles in the book??s protagonist: the aging, once-great stage actor Simon Axler. “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing had happened: he couldn’t act,” it begins...