the [tk] review
Essays
Anna Karenina: The Original THAT Girl
I suspect that I am in good company when I say that I long put off reading Anna Karenina (Oxford University Press, $9.95) despite many trusted friends’ plugs of it. I didn’t think there would be much to relate to in a tragic, sweeping epic. It didn’t exactly seem like the kind of book you [...]
Adding Sugar to the Mix: On Demystifying the Author Crush
It is a universally acknowledged truth that writers are rarely who we imagine them to be. We take in a writer’s stories, their language, their carefully selected adjectives, and we assemble a portrait of the person who has captured our imagination…This romantic analysis, I imagine, is what happens for those of us who read one [...]
Self-Published: One Writer’s Manifesto*
There’s no better way to officially mark a paradigm shift than to declare, in some sweeping, general way, the simple notion that things are changing. Many see self-publishing as a sort of runner-up to the grand prize. A way to settle should a publisher or agent not want to invest in a writer’s work. Admittedly, [...]
Does James Franco Deserve to be in Ploughshares?
I should start by specifying that the experiment I set out to conduct here was undertaken in the spirit of genuine curiosity. Because, who knows? Maybe he does. It can’t be denied that the boy has a pretty face, and the aesthetically gifted have always been a tempting target for haters. In this case there [...]
Why I Abandon My Books (and why you should, too)
It ultimately became a question of honesty: be generous of spirit, or hoard in the hopes of self-preservation. A question of accepting one’s limitations versus living in denial. None of which, of course, make you a terrible person. They just make you a terrible reader. I have a yearly tradition (one I’m sure many people [...]
Looking for Whitman: A Walking Tour of Literary Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem, one of Brooklyn’s Brooklyniest bards, famously described his native borough thus: “Brooklyn is repulsive with novelists, it’s cancerous with novelists.” Evan Hughes’s recent book Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (Holt, $16) reminds us that it has always been so. On a cold but sunny afternoon [...]
The Wall
Maybe many people live somewhere in the distance between the lives they live and the lives they’d imagined; for me, this gap had become too big. I’d received tenure at an East Harlem middle school where I was an English teacher, and yet the thought of the life waiting ahead depressed me. I’d come here [...]
Racing the Headless Horseman
Last Saturday, I woke up at seven in the morning, hopped on the Metro-North to Sleepy Hollow, and ran the town’s annual 10K. It was a beautiful, crisp autumn day. Although the leaves have only just begun to change in the city, they had made considerably greater progress up the Hudson. A number of the [...]
Finding the Future by Examining the Past, at the NYPL
For the true book nerds out there, the 42nd street branch of the New York Public Library is one of the most special places in the entire city, let alone in the entire world. It’s majestic, it’s amazing, it’s accessible and mysterious all at once. And in an unexpected turn of events, I got to [...]
Word-of-Biggest-Mouth
Last week I sent a book up to a relative, with a note attached saying, “Please, if you love this, tell a lot of people–this book really needs great word-of-mouth!” A few days later, she sent me an email, thanking me, but asking “Do you think this book won’t do well?” “No,” I wrote back. [...]
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