Poetry in Motion: The Day Phil Parma Died

I sometimes picture the peak of Northeast winters, from the season’s first snowfall until about late February, as a hearth beside which friends and family inevitably nest.  You’d think you’d see less of these people in cruel weather, but I find it to be the opposite: we come together to huddle for warmth and get a bit fatter in dark and stormy conditions. Unlike me, the season’s cold rain caused Flaubert’s heart to “crumble into ruins”. But Flaubert seems to […]

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Indexing: Jet-lag literature, Nabokov, The Believer, Edith Wharton, and more

Tobias Carroll And lo: there was the literature of jet-lag. The second time around, the strengths of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition remained intact: haunted characters and a pinpoint command of culture. Its flaws — notably, a conclusion that effectively sidelines the novel’s protagonist — remained present. And still, Pattern Recognition may well be my favorite of Gibson’s books: a morally resonant, deeply contemporary thriller that hits nearly all of my sweet spots. (Mysterious films, subcultural intrigue, globetrotting.) Were I fond of […]

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