Resemblance of things past: Günter Grass's shadowy account of his long and eventful life, Peeling the Onion, is far less convincing than his fiction (and more and more and more and more). Gullible’s travels: What happens when an author writes about a country they have never been to? The quixotic don: The cultural pull of Cervantes' creation runs dark and deep, influencing Latin American literature, music and art. Writer Jorge Luis Borges saw mazes as a metaphor for life. Two decades after his death, a real one is helping to keep his name alive.
JT LeRoy, the authorial “other” whom the writer Laura Albert employed as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found to be not just a fictional creation, but a fraud, and more on the tension between art and commerce. No bad authors: Reasonableness is one of the first things to go when we toil to put our hearts and minds on the printed page. Manga Shakespeare. You hear the words and you think, Manga Shakespeare? Really?
A Comic Kingdom Made of Words: Know-it-all butlers, doddering earls and flighty young ladies—all were P. G. Wodehouse’s elaborate cover for his lifelong love affair with the language. A review of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 by Katie Roiphe (and an interview). True or False: Jane Austen outsells Alice Walker and Ann Coulter.
A review of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America by Joan Shelley Rubin. From The New Yorker, an article on Harold Bloom and Barack Obama's poetry. From Dissent, art meets politics: Gail Levin on how Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party came to Brooklyn; and an article on Tony's Last Supper: On The Sopranos and politics.
A new issue of Open Letters Monthly is out, including Running Toward the Truck: Newspaper book pages are under threat. John Cotter assesses the reviews of Jonathan Lethem’s novel You Don’t Love Me Yet to learn what (if anything) in our print reviews is worth saving. What might the Wall Street Journal become if Rupert Murdoch owned it? Ken Auletta investigates.
Can the Internet be saved? Citing spam, viruses, and unreliable connections, scientists plan a moon shot: reinventing the whole thing. When Computers Attack: Governments are readying themselves for the Big One, a long-announced, long-awaited cyberwar of global proportions. I just want to be friends with you It used to be the old boys' network that kept the powerful connected, and the riff-raff out. Now politicians and princes go cyber-schmoozing on Facebook. Since when did it become OK to sign off work emails with kisses? Stuart Jeffries laments the rise of bogus email intimacy.
