The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema
“Frank Capra said, ‘Film is a disease.’ I caught the disease early on. I felt it whenever I walked up to the ticket booth with my mother or my father or my brother.
Martin Scorcese, New York Review of Books

A Contribution to the Critique of John Mayer
“John Mayer does not merely live. He also has not been executed.”
Evan Calder Williams, The New Inquiry

Eyelid Lick By Donald Lumbar
“A book-length poem defiling any preconceived notions of poetry collections.”
David Peak, The Rumpus

This Charming Man
“How the hell can you transfer the misery of the Trayvon Martin case to Jay Z and his dopey new album?”
Sasha Frere-Jones, New Yorker

Faith in Fiction
“I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor. I’m also sick of Walker Percy, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dostoevsky.”
Randy Boyagoda, First Things

ICYMI: Wes Anderson’s Worlds
“From Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson’s films readily, even eagerly, concede the ‘miniature’ quality of the worlds he builds, in their set design and camera-work, in their use of stop-motion, maps, and models. And yet these miniatures span continents and decades. They comprise crime, adultery, brutality, suicide, the death of a parent, the drowning of a child, moments of profound joy and transcendence.”
Michael Chabon, New York Review of Books

The Voice of Ireland: An Interview with Writer Kevin Barry
“[W]riters need to eat! Part of the problem I feel with modern technology is that everyone expects artists to work for free; and if they do express a desire to get paid, this somehow connotes that they are opportunistic scumbags not totally devoted to their art, and so on.”
T.J. Logan, Wunderkammer Magazine

Norm McDonald’s Weird, Wonderful Twitter Book Club
“[H]e’s so well read he puts your old English lit professor to shame.”
Stuart Thomson, Ballast

Charles Rosen’s Lost Masterpiece
“Charles Rosen’s intellectual grasp of music was peerless.”
Jim Holt, New York Review of Books