Master Your Mind with Ruby Wax
Sane New World: A User’s Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind by Ruby Wax NY: Perigee Trade, 2014; 256pp Mindfulness seems to be less a case of mind over matter than mind over emotion. In this...
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A Year in Tehran
The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran by Hooman Majd NY: Anchor Books, 2014; 272pp “I advise you not to hang around the Americans very much.” This...
read moreReview: The Children Act by Ian McEwan
The Children Act (Nan A. Talese, 2014) is a short novel, and this is, says writer Ian McEwan, a good thing: If we can make this fine distinction, it’s a short novel rather than a novella. But I do...
read moreRoberto Bolaño’s Expanding Universe
The first English translation of one of Roberto Bolaño’s novels was published in 2003, the same year he died, at the age of fifty, of liver failure. Susan Sontag was his anglophone herald,...
read moreInside the Lie
September 29, 2014. As an amber-violet sunset spread across a CinemaScope sky to the west of Manhattan, the House of SpeakEasy returned to City Winery for the inaugural show of its fall season....
read moreRoxane Gay is a Bad Feminist
Reading Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, 2014) was a personally instructive experience. As a white, male reader with a pretty fat tire of privilege under my belt, it’s an...
read moreBig Success in Little Failure
1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. — Gary Shteyngart I’m...
read moreCurtain Call: Inside the Lie
Seriously Entertaining is back! The first of our two shows this fall, Inside the Lie, hits City Winery on Monday, September 29, with a mind-expanding line-up of literary talent. Don’t have...
read moreFar From the Tree: Andrew Solomon on How to Love Your Children
If, like me, you saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead at an impressionable age, or The Omen, or you read Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, the prospect of parenthood may be haunted...
read moreFive Reasons to Love Bret Easton Ellis Online
Does anyone know who @BretEastonEllis is?— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) April 10, 2009 It’s boring to call Bret Easton Ellis “controversial.” Yeah, American...
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