Omnivore
What is college for?
From Workplace, a special issue on Narratives of Academic Labor. How big-time sports ate college life: Should a stadium (or court) be at the center of college culture? How football and basketball hijacked the American campus. Critics claim the SAT can be gamed — if that's the case, why are they still so important in college admissions? The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time. It is college and university leaders, not Occupy protesters, who have politicized issues of free
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Paper Trail
The good news: The Chicago Tribune is getting a new stand-alone, 24-page book review section, and a free sample will be available on Sunday. The bad news: It will cost Tribune subscribers an additional $99 a year to get the review, which is being marketed as "premium content."
Do book bloggers matter? Reed Exhibitions thinks so—they’ve just bought the two year-old Book Blogger Convention as a supplement to BookExpo America (BEA).
Children’s
…Syllabi
Remixology
Judy LillibridgeYou're a rare writer if you don't occasionally suspect yourself of plagiarism, of unconsciously stealing phrases from your favorite author or appropriating plot points from books you've read as a child. …- Field of Screens Michael Thomsen
- Playing with Tennis Courtney Fiske
- The Pleasures of Misbehavior Alex Aciman
- Ruins Brian Dillon
- Notes on Raunch Adam Wilson
Daily Review
The Incomplete Cain
Somebody always takes it about as far as it'll go, and no one took the hard-boiled farther than Paul Cain. Cain's entire contribution to the genre — a slim novel and 14 stories, some of which haven't seen print since the 1930s — is now available as The Complete … - The Map and the Territory
by Michel Houellebecq - The Flame Alphabet
by Ben Marcus
Interviews
Greil Marcus
For the past forty years, Greil Marcus has looked at rock music not just as entertainment but as part of American mythology. Reading Marcus is to witness a stray musical note become the spine of an essay, or a growl connect Billboard hits to civil war customs. In his latest book, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, Marcus explains what he hears in The Doors' work—everything from Thomas Pynchon to Val Kilmer—song by song. Bookforum spoke to Marcus about Elvis impersonators, songs so good they make you almost wreck your car, and whether Jim Morrison is just a little embarrassing.
…- Some years ago, while I was interviewing a cordial octogenarian for my biography of …
- In Sweden, according to Lars Arffssen's recent novel, "Nordic Dullness Syndrome" …
- In 2008, I attended a lecture Gary Lutz delivered to a packed room at Columbia …
- As befits a well-practiced and much-lauded controversialist, Michel Houellebecq’s …
- It should come as no surprise that Ben Marcus has written a novel about language …
- God bless Caitlin Flanagan. Without her, who else would give voice to the sorts of …
- Kate Zambreno resists easy classification. Her fiction squirms under the critic’s …
- In his chatty and astute new memoir, musician and super-producer Nile Rodgers recounts …
- For much of the past century or so, Mexico has existed out of context. The Institutional …
Reviews
Roundtable
Retromania: A Roundtable with Ann Powers, Carl Wilson, and Daphne Carr
"This is the way that pop ends," music critic Simon Reynolds wrote in his 2011 book, Retromania. "Not with a bang but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pavement album you played to death in your first year in college." The death of originality in music; our cultural obsession with nostalgia; the near-total availability of any kind of music, at any time—these are the themes that made
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