Vintage (1998) Boing Boing article on shopdropping cement teddy bears.

Poet Alexander Nemser reviews recent Pevear & Volkhonsky’s as well as Bromfield’s translations of two different versions of the War and Peace.

A paean to English

American life had changed him. Now he loved hand tools–oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.
-Ha Jin,* A Free Life

I’ve started writing in English about ten years ago, when I found that English was the […]

Is Putin the owner of a $40 billion fortune? Previous estimates in Russian press put Vlad’s personal wealth at around $400k (a thank you gift of a $ million condo in Tel Aviv for his old teacher notwithstanding). Article is also good for analysis of internal Kremlin conflicts and theories on how long Putin will […]

The Literary Provenance of Blogs and Other Lessons from Capote

The view of blogs as anthologies of obscure facts masquerading as personal journals seems spot on to me. But so much of Capote’s writing is similarly revealing in this quiet, unassuming way. His choices have nothing exhibitionist about them. The words, when unusual, are simply right: Perry’s, the murderer’s, pastiche of scribblings is an anthology. In another passage, Capote describes the winter winds on the Kansas prairie as “razory.” The measure of how perfect his words are is that they seemed to have always existed. Here they are, the newly-minted clichés of our future. They immediately supersede all alternatives. What else can cold February winds be other than “razory”?