Books

Before Clint Eastwood brought his masterful adaptation to screen, Mystic River was a novel by Dennis Lehane, the story of three boys in working-class Boston.

It’s hard to tell whether Bernard-Henri Lévy, colloquially known (often exasperatedly) as “BHL”, gets a bad rap. On the one hand, he has been one of the West’s most consistent and enterprising critics of human rights abuses.

This week’s events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1968 protests made for an interesting study in alumni relations. With 1968 protester Hilton Obenzinger’s new autobiographical novel Busy Dying in hand, I headed to Saturday night’s reading by alumni, most—if not all—of whom took part in the protests.

Michael Chabon is a natural.

Tayari Jones’ debut, Leaving Atlanta, is set during the 1979 Atlanta Child Murders, at which time a total of 29 black children were killed.

When friends, extended family, or even strangers hear that you’re an English or—God forbid—a creative writing major, their usual response is sympathetic: “good luck,” occasionally coupled with the offer of a couch to sleep on in 10 years, when they assume you’ll be out of work and/or writing the next Great American Novel.

After spending all week and most of the weekend reading, analyzing, and writing about literature written before we were born, it sometimes feels like literature has lost its passion and is settling for a vivisectionist nostalgia.

Henri Cole describes his own poetry as astringent. His words are stark and piercing—he writes that his forceful style helps him to “persevere each day at my writing table, where I must confront myself, overcome any fear of what I might find there.”

There’s nothing better than a meta-book, as every true bookworm knows.

Rarely are book titles as painfully obvious as Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men.