Omnivore
Deep philosophical waters
The latest issue of Plato: The Internet Journal of the International Plato Society is now out. David Chalmers (ANU): Why Isn't There More Progress in Philosophy? From the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, Andreas Vrahimis (Cyprus): "Was There a Sun Before Men Existed?": A. J. Ayer and French Philosophy in the Fifties. Do novels tell us anything about the ethical life that analytic philosophy cannot? Liam Burrell wonders. From 3:AM, Edouard Machery is a killer cool philosopher
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Paper Trail
Roughly a year after launching a redesigned website, the Los Angeles Review of Books is putting out its first print issue.
Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker Prize for her short stories. (Read Rivka Galchen's essay of Davis's translation of Madame Bovary.)
Pulitzer prize-winning New Yorker staffer Katherine Boo won the New York Public Library’s 2013 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism this week for Behind the Beautiful Forevers
…Syllabi
Western Ex-Pats in Post-War Japan
Colin MarshallThe 1950s through the 80s saw Japan go from post-war disrepair to world-frightening powerhouse, adapting and even improving all manner of Western inventions from cars and consumer electronics to jeans …- The Golden Age of the English Poet-Critic Tayt Harlin
- The Anglophone Epistolary Novel Len Gutkin
- The Life and Afterlife of Sylvia Plath Emma Komlos-Hrobsky
- Homebodies Allison Bulger
- Women on Women in Love Phyllis Fong
Daily Review
Five Stories
MICE LIVE IN OUR WALLS but do not trouble our kitchen. We are pleased but cannot understand why they do not come into our kitchen where we have traps set, as they come into the kitchens of our neighbors. Although we are pleased, we are also upset, because the mice behave … Interviews
James Lasdun
In his new book, Give Me Everything You Have, James Lasdun chronicles the ordeal he suffered at the hands of an obsessive former student. "The project began as an act of self-protection," says Lasdun, "but it didn't work, because I kept sounding like a crazy person. How do you write a story that is so bizarre and in which you are a major participant without sounding crazy?"
…- You can take the girl out of prison, but you can’t take prison out of the girl. …
- Of all the things one can portray in a movie, marriage is surely not the most titillating. …
- BY TURNS EPIC, THRILLING, SUSPENSEFUL, and utterly appalling, at once deeply researched …
- The war on terror was sold as a war scarier than all the rest. Even now, it’s tempting …
- After living in China for more than a decade, what struck Peter Hessler most upon …
- YOU DON’T HAVE TO CONDUCT A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT to see why some philosophers or scientists …
- Speak, memory: “Nan’s pussy got damp but not soaking wet,” the musician Richard …
- On January 30, approximately 180 people overfilled an auditorium in the New York …
- Since its publication in 2008, Fiona Maazel’s first novel, Last Last Chance, has won …
- “People expect too much of writers,” Albert Camus lamented in the late 1950s. At …
- There is no such thing as “the Internet.” That is to say: Thinking, writing, and …
- In an epigraph at the beginning of his new novel, All That Is, James Salter announces …
Reviews
Essay
Geneva Murder Mystery: On "La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert"
Atossa Abrahamian
Joel Dicker, a 27-year-old Swiss novelist, is the talk of the town in his native city of Geneva, Dicker’s second book, La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert (ed, Fallois/l’Age d’Homme, Sept.
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