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Doctor Sleep By Stephen King – Review

Sam Leith, The Guardian

Storytelling is everything – and by golly does he know how to carry the reader.

“The Night Guest”: The Lady And The Tiger

Laura Miller, Salon

Fiona McFarlane’s first novel, “The Night Guest,” is a little bit ghost story, a little bit crime fiction and a whole lot unsettling.

Sleeping Keys By Jean Sprackland – Review

Kate Kellaway, The Guardian

Jean Sprackland's poems are an uncommon pleasure to read. They are defined by their hospitable grace. They're easy to take in yet anything but superficial: they repay return visits.

Escape From “Saturday Night Live,” Birth Of “The Muppet Show”

Brian Jay Jones, Salon

Two of the most iconic shows of the '70s have an amazing, awkward linked history -- but needed each other to begin.

Easy Money

Keith Romer, New Yorker

They were giving away money. That was the reason I took the long subway ride from Brooklyn to Harlem one Sunday morning in August. Once I arrived, though, it was all too clear that I wasn’t the only one who had heard about the opportunity. The open audition for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” was supposed to run from noon to five, but already, a little after eleven, a line of would-be millionaires snaked out of the lobby of the Apollo Theatre and down the sidewalk. We were a diverse bunch of dreamers. I waited in line behind an effete Jewish guy and an older African-American man who was discussing the pros and cons of Obamacare, and just in front of a petite young Korean woman, who did her best to respond politely to a lady who seemed unable to keep herself from sharing the strange, likely fictitious, details of her own life, most notably the masters degree in reverse psychology that she claimed to have earned from Nassau Community College. Before we were admitted, en masse, to the theatre, the reverse psychologist wandered off, drawn away by another, even more powerful dream.

All That We Hold Dear

Jami Attenberg, New York Times

In a recent New Yorker article about his time as a Google Glass Explorer, Gary Shteyngart discussed the challenge of setting a novel in the current moment, given the speed of social upheaval and technological advances. “To write a book set in the present, circa 2013,” he declared, “is to write about the distant past.” Dara Horn’s ambitious fourth novel, “A Guide for the Perplexed,” bears this exact burden: it is set partly in contemporary Egypt, post-­revolution, and much of its plot involves a technology not unlike Google Glass itself.

Bitter Fruit

Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times

In 1976, Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek won a Nobel Prize for identifying a fatal disease in a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. By the time of his death in 2008, Gajdusek had achieved another kind of notoriety, having been imprisoned for sexually abusing one of the dozens of native children he had adopted. Hanya Yanagihara’s suspenseful first novel, “The People in the Trees,” is based loosely on this true story, with a number of horrifying twists.

‘The Last First Day,’ By Carrie Brown

Reeve Lindbergh, Washington Post

“The Last First Day” is Carrie Brown’s quietly powerful new novel about a married couple, Peter and Ruth, moving into the last period of their long, shared lives.

Say Hello To Rick Ross

Mike Sager, Esquire

1980: Crack was just turning up in the United States. The contras were seeking funds to support their civil war in Nicaragua. And an L. A. kid was looking for an opportunity. The combination would change America.

Doctor Sleep By Stephen King – Review

Steven Poole, The Guardian

What the novel lacks in brute fright, though, it makes up for with more subtle pleasures.

The Most Irish Island In The World

Anne Enright, The Irish Times

The residents of Newfoundland don’t like being called ‘Newfies’ or Canadians, but you can call them Irish. And the town of Tilting, on its little-brother island of Fogo, is ‘Irish on the rocks’.

Mystery Man

Ruth Graham, Poetry Foundation

For a few years in the 1930s, Ronald Lane Latimer struck gold as an editor, publishing Stevens, Williams, and more. Then he disappeared.

Gandhi’s Formative Years

Ramachandra Guha, Financial Times

To understand a biographical subject, we must understand the people around them.

Is There A Word For That?

Ralph Keyes, The American Scholar

Soon after they arrived in America, British settlers got busy with an important task: reinventing their language.

Writing And Whistle-Blowing

Morgan Meis, The Smart Set

What does George Orwell have in common with Edward Snowden? They’ve both been trapped in bad situations.

Slo-mo Mojo

The Economist

Flies may seem short-lived to people, but from a dipteran point of view they can thus live to a ripe old age. Remember that next time you try (and fail) to swat one.

Poem Of The Week: To Autumn By John Keats

Carol Rumens, The Guardian

Hush Up, Franzen! Don’t Blame Twitter For Shallowness

Clive Thompson, Salon

I doubt the ambient broadcasting universe is making people more trivial. What it’s doing is revealing how trivial we’ve been all along, because it’s making conversation suddenly visible.

Stephen King: On Alcoholism And Returning To The Shining

Emma Brockes, The Guardian

Stephen King has written a lot of books – at 56 novels, he's closing in on Agatha Christie – some of which have been great, some of which less so. Still, he says, when people say, "Steve, your books are uneven", he's confident "there's good stuff in all of 'em". Now and then, a story lingers in his mind long after it's published. When fans ask what happened to Charlie McGee in Firestarter, for example, King isn't interested. But when they ask what happened to Danny Torrance, the boy from The Shining, he always found himself wondering. Specifically: what the story would have looked like if Danny's father – mad "white-knuckle alcoholic" Jack Torrance – had "found AA. And I thought, well, let's find out."

Book Review: ‘Jim Henson’ By Brian Jay Jones

David Kirby, Washington Post

Henson was a genial workaholic, and his attention to his empire was so all-consuming that neither he nor anyone else noticed that he had become ill from the rare streptococcal infection that would kill him. At the time, he was in negotiations to sell his company to Disney, a process so stressful that some of his intimates say it may have compromised his immune system. When family and employees gathered to mourn him, they saw a hand-drawn card sent by the Imagineers at Disney that showed a disconsolate Kermit sitting on a log, head in hands, as Mickey Mouse sits next to him, his arm over Kermit’s shoulders.

When I read that passage to my wife, she sniffled and dabbed at her eyes. Oh, come on, I thought. Kermit, Mickey: They’re not real. But aren’t they?

Poetry Isn't As Useless As A Lot Of Poets Say It Is

Noah Berlatsky, The Atlantic

A recent speech at Yale inadvertently sums up what's wrong with the art form these days: Its gatekeepers believe poetry matters because it's poetry, not because of what it says.

Is There A Word For That?

Ralph Keyes, The American Scholar

We have long invented language to fill gaps in our vocabulary, but not all coinages are created equal.

A Grand Unified Theory Of Pixar

Jon Negroni, Slate

The Grand Unified Theory of Pixar is a long tale, spanning centuries, of a struggle for the domination of Earth among humans, animals with humanlike consciousness, and sentient inanimate objects—AI machines. The theory begins and ends with Brave, the studio’s 13th feature film and one that falls at the very beginning of the animated universe’s chronology as we know it. It’s in Brave, set in the Middle Ages, where moviegoers find a character that they first met more than a decade before in a seemingly unrelated film set several millennia in the future, at the far end of the Pixar timeline. But we’re getting several thousand animated years ahead of ourselves.

Philosophy Is Not A 'Ridiculous' Pursuit. It Is Worth Funding

Paul Redding, The Guardian

I remember a cartoon from the 1960s: a man in an office is leaning back in his chair, feet crossed on the desk, staring at the ceiling. The sign on the half-open door reads “philosophy department”. A passing colleague asks: “Dan, don’t you ever stop working?” A nice joke, having the right combination of absurdity and half-truth. Philosophy is an activity that can look like inactivity. But let’s not get carried away. Philosophising is, like all intellectual work, work.

From Mars

Lizzie Widdicombe, New Yorker

A young man’s adventures in women’s publishing.

I Didn't Love My Wife When We Got Married

Elad Nehorai, The Huffington Post

No, love isn't an emotion or even a noun. It's a verb. Better defined as giving. As putting someone else's needs above your own.

We’ll Never Find Atlantis

Emily Tamkin, Slate

Which is, for Atlantis-bound adventurers, the whole point: People love mysteries and the idea that they can be the ones to solve them. If Atlantis could be anywhere, that means it can be everywhere. If anyone could stumble upon the true Atlantis, then everyone can.

Bad Dreams

Tessa Hadley, New Yorker

Snaps Of America

Larissa Pham, Full Stop

I am standing on a dirt trail that winds up a lushly forested hill, somewhere in Wisconsin, holding my iPhone in one hand and my friend Cameron’s car keys in the other. I tap the screen, pointing the camera at my white sneakers and the red dust that’s beginning to settle on them, then pan to the trees and the trail, recording my halting progress up the hill until it gets too steep and I have to use both hands for balance, scurrying like a mountain goat up the overlook. Cam is waiting at the top, hand shading his eyes surveyor-style, his phone out, too.

“Sorry it took a while,” I tell Cam, handing him the keys. “It’s steep, and I was vine-ing.” The six-second loop is still playing in my hand, while we’re talking. My feet, the trees, the path, the achingly blue sky. “There’s no service up here, though.”

How Detroit Went Broke: The Answers May Surprise You - And Don't Blame Coleman Young

Nathan Bomey And John Gallagher, Detroit Free Press

Detroit is broke, but it didn’t have to be. An in-depth Free Press analysis of the city’s financial history back to the 1950s shows that its elected officials and others charged with managing its finances repeatedly failed — or refused — to make the tough economic and political decisions that might have saved the city from financial ruin.

Still Shining And Spooked, But Hopeful

Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Doctor Sleep” is on the long side, but it tells a very quick and nimble story. It makes up in suspense what it lacks in nuance, and its special effects are easy to visualize.

The Deaths By Mark Lawson – Review

Alex Preston, The Guardian

The Deaths gives us a glimpse into the lives of the 1%, showing all the unhappiness that money can buy.

Beyond Borscht

Sara Wheeler, New York Times

The culinary memoir has lately evolved into a genre of its own, what is now known as a “foodoir.” But Anya von Bremzen is a better writer than most of the genre’s practitioners, as this delectable book, which tells the story of postrevolutionary Russia through the prism of one family’s meals, amply demonstrates.

‘Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life Of The Amnesic Patient, H. M.’ By Suzanne Corkin

Michael S. roth, Washington Post

Henry Molaison (1926-2008) lived a long life, but as it turned out, he experienced most of it in a very short time segments. His seizures started early, and by the time he was in high school they had become frequent. Medications to control epilepsy had a variety of side effects, and still they didn’t eliminate the seizures. The terrible blackouts were always a possibility.

What's Wrong With The Modern World

Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian

The thing about Kraus is that he's is very hard to follow on a first reading – deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: "If he understands one sentence of the essay, I'll retract the entire thing." If you read Kraus's sentences more than once, you'll find that they have a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment.

Turn Left, And Head For Queens

Janet Maslin, New York Times

In “Dissident Gardens,” a novel jampacked with the human energy of a crowded subway car, Jonathan Lethem attempts a daunting feat: turning three generations’ worth of American leftists into a tragicomic tale of devolution.

The Deaths By Mark Lawson – Review

John O'Connell, The Guardian

Murder seems almost an afterthought in this sharp and very funny social satire.

The Rising Value Of Land In Book Titles

Alex Williams, New York Times

Even the world of publishing, it seems, is not immune to the whims of fashion.

Why Jennifer Weiner Is Wrong About The Times Book Review

Christopher Beha, Slate

It doesn’t need to review more popular fiction. Or lit fiction, either. It needs to review holy crap fiction.

Examined Lives

Phyllis Rose, The American Scholar

A mystery exists at the heart of all literary biography: How does the mush of experience get turned into glittering artifact?

Hitler In Hollywood

David Denby, New Yorker

Did the studios collaborate?

The Family Apron

Julia Moskin, New York Times

“Cooking was not considered a respectable or profitable profession,” said Maria Guarnaschelli, an eminent cookbook editor and the mother of Alex Guarnaschelli, who is the chef at Butter, in Greenwich Village. “We never thought our daughter would be a chef.”

Now, a generation of chefs and entrepreneurs who grew up in the kitchen are shaping American food.

The End Of Night

Paul Bogard, Slate

I sometimes try to imagine living in a city before electricity. How quiet pre-electric nights would have been without cars or trucks or taxis, without any internal combustion engines at all. No radios, televisions, or computers. No cellphones, no headphones, nor anything to plug those headphones into if you had them. How deserted the city with most of the population locked inside their homes, the night left to fears of crime, sickness, and immorality, and best avoided if one could. Finally, and most strangely—the biggest difference from that time to ours—not one single, solitary electric light.

A Numerical Love Story

Katie Hafner, New York Times

“Thinking in Numbers” is an interesting collection of ideas, and worth reading if only for the suspenseful description of an extraordinary man in a room, conveying to a rapt audience his pure love of one very special string of digits as it stretches to infinity and beyond.

‘Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives’ By Sarah Weinman

Patrick Anderson, Washington Post

Sarah Weinman’s short-story anthology, “Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives,” honors an earlier generation of American women crime writers who she believes have been denied the recognition they deserve. Her book contains stories by 14 writers who were publishing mostly from the early 1940s through the mid-’70s.

A Peek Inside My Son's Head

David Mitchell, Slate

When you know that your kid wants to speak with you, when you know that he’s taking in his surroundings every bit as attentively as your nonautistic daughter, whatever the evidence to the contrary, then you can be ten times more patient, willing, understanding and communicative; and ten times better able to help his development. It is no exaggeration to say that The Reason I Jump allowed me to round a corner in our relationship with our son. Naoki Higashida’s writing administered the kick I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself, and start thinking how much tougher life was for my son, and what I could do to make it less tough.

They’re Taking Over!

Tim Flannery, The New York Review Of Books

Most jellyfish are little more than gelatinous bags containing digestive organs and gonads, drifting at the whim of the current. But box jellyfish are different. They are active hunters of medium-sized fish and crustaceans, and can move at up to twenty-one feet per minute. They are also the only jellyfish with eyes that are quite sophisticated, containing retinas, corneas, and lenses. And they have brains, which are capable of learning, memory, and guiding complex behaviors.

Citi Bike And The City

Nicole Gelinas, City Journal

Some thoughts on cycling around Manhattan.

The Saturday Poem: Deer

Helen Mort, The Guardian

Final Showdown

Andrew Sean Greer, New York Times

What a joy it is to see Margaret Atwood taking such delicious pleasure in the end of the world. And it is nothing but flowers.

Why we read New York Times wealth porn

Roxane Gay, Salon

Their stories of the 1 percent are gruesome real-world fairy tales -- and I can't look away.

Unhappy Truckers And Other Algorithmic Problems

Tom Vanderbilt, Nautilus

Algorithms: Transportation optimization starts with math, but ends in understanding human behavior.

My Daughter’s Piercing

Natalie Serber, Salon

I was shocked when I saw her nipple. The next months taught me I wasn't in charge of her body -- or my own.

The Blunders Of Our Governments By Anthony King And Ivor Crewe – Review

Peter Wilby, The Guardian

This book will make you gasp in disbelief and stamp your feet in rage, and quite frequently reduce you to helpless laughter. It will also make you tremble in terror at the realisation that the people in charge of our destinies are, in many respects, idiots.

‘Sesame Street’ Widens Its Focus

Elizabeth Jensen, New York Times

Simple ABCs and 123s? So old school. In the last four years, “Sesame Street” has set itself a much larger goal: teaching nature, math, science and engineering concepts and problem-solving to a preschool audience — with topics like how a pulley works or how to go about investigating what’s making Mr. Snuffleupagus sneeze.

Memoir In The Age Of BuzzFeed

Wayne Koestenbaum, Salon

Matias Viegener's high-concept "2500 Random Things About Me Too" echoes Joyce and Artaud.

“Something Terrible Has Happened Here”: The Crazy Story Of How “Clue” Went From Forgotten Flop To Cult Triumph

Adam B. Vary, BuzzFeed

That a high-concept, fast-talking farce based on a board game was a box office bomb in 1985 is no huge mystery. But figuring out how it became an enduring favorite is a Hollywood whodunit for the ages. (The prime suspect: You, in the living room, with the remote control.)

Rubber-Suit Monsters Fade. Tiny Tokyos Relax.

Martin Fackler, New York Times

But now, in an era when lifelike digital effects have made the use of small models and suited actors look quaint and kitschy, tokusatsu is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The last Godzilla movie shot in this style, the aptly named “Godzilla Final Wars,” was released almost a decade ago, after a half-century span during which the creature appeared in 28 films, sometimes every year.

Varieties Of Disturbance

John Lahr, New Yorker

Where do Claire Danes’s volcanic performances come from?

Mind's Eye

Charles Bethea, Atlanta Magazine

How Bernie Marcus and a Yale scientist are revolutionizing autism treatment.

Science Fiction Is No Longer A Boys’ Club

Ghezal Hamidi, Salon

Shelley’s contribution to the genre has been immense, but women are still, most certainly, changing things in sci-fi.