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A Meaningful Life By L. J. Davis NYRB Classics, 214 pages, $14.95 A funny thing happens when you grow up in New York. For 18 or 20 years, everyone you know is growing up here, too. Then one day you walk into a party and someone tells you, “I never met anyone from New York before!” And you discover that, without actually going anywhere, you’re suddenly in someone else’s sausage factory, the place... READ MORE»
The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six By Jonathon Keats Random House, 221 pages, $13 In 2003, the conceptual artist Jonathon Keats sold his brain. Or rather, he sold options to buy his neurons in lots of one million immediately after his death. That is, to buy not the physical bits of brain, but the information they represent. (He had previously copyrighted the totality of his thought as a sculpture he made by thinking.)... READ MORE»
“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.” —Sarah Palin, Oct. 16, 2008 1620: A group of English Puritans, seeking religious freedom, higher taxes and the opportunity to establish a welfare state, found Plymouth Colony... READ MORE»
The Girl With the Dragon TattooBy Stieg LarssonAlfred A. Knopf, 480 pages, $24.95 My review copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, is covered with statistics about its success in Europe—it sold nearly one copy for every three Swedes; the books in the trilogy beat Harry Potter on the French charts—and the plans, likewise, for its success over here—a first printing of 150,000 copies; “outreach” to... READ MORE»
On June 9, subscribers to mac.com—a service that for a $99 annual fee provides online photo storage, personal calendars and an e-mail address announcing one’s allegiance to the modish computer brand of the decade—received a missive from an entity called “The .Mac Team.” “Today, Apple announced a new Internet service called MobileMe,” this team wrote brightly, going on to promise “a host of new features,” including the ability to “push” a clump of data... READ MORE»
Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States By George Stewart NYRB Classics, 544 pages, $19.95 A young man, let’s say, finds himself in the attic of his grandmother’s house in Ancram, N.Y., on a rainy afternoon in the late autumn, looking for a book to read. In a pile of dusty volumes under one window, between bound volumes of a previous generation’s women’s magazines and moldering French cookbooks, he finds... READ MORE»
When someone asks, “How’s it going?” answer, “As the necessary consequence of previous actions!” While they attain satori, make your escape. If someone asks, “What’s new?” spread apart your hands and answer, “Everything!” with a creepy grin. If the creepy grin doesn’t work, try adding, “And also, nothing!” and tapping them on the nose. If someone asks, “How’s it going?” answer, “How isn’t it going?” (cf: “What isn’t new,” “What time isn’t it,” “How isn’t... READ MORE»
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of JokesBy Jim HoltW. W. Norton, 160 pages, $15.95 The eponymous shaggy-dog story is about a boy who enters his dog into a local "shaggy-dog contest." When the dog wins, the boy enters him into a larger regional contest, and then, when the dog wins that one, too, into still another, until finally, after a tortuously narrated series of trials and triumphs, the dog... READ MORE»
THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBORBy Joseph MitchellPantheon, 293 pages, $23 Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s that are all,... READ MORE»
FAREWELL NAVIGATORBy Leni ZumasOpen City Books, 168 pages, $14 Open City Released a new book of stories last month. It’s called Farewell Navigator. It’s written by Leni Zumas. They’re not really stories. They’re also not gargoyles, but they’re more like gargoyles. They’re delicate tone poems that, however, center most often on the cruel, the disgusting or the sad. This reviewer wonders whether that’s inevitable, whether stories (which are not stories) that are driven by the... READ MORE»
Poets House of Soho, founded by Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray in 1985, has long had a devoted patron in the actor Bill Murray, who played a cameo role in the Transom’s childhood: En... READ MORE»
“I’m interrogating a minor, and then I’ll be with you,” writer and amateur pugilist Jonathan Ames told the Transom at a benefit for the literary magazine Open City on Thursday, May 22.... READ MORE»
THE POST-OFFICE GIRL By Stefan Zweig NYRB Classics, 257 pages, $14 Christine Hoflehner, beautiful and carefree before the First World War, loses her brother, is impoverished by the collapse of her father’s business and is condemned, finally, to endless monotony as a postal clerk in a forgotten little town, earning only enough to keep herself and her ailing, widowed mother. “One village post office in Austria is much like another,” begins The Post-Office Girl,... READ MORE»
America’s oldest rescue mission, founded in 1872, stands across White Street from a 16-story building that is now mostly N.Y.U. dorms. Sometimes in the evening you can see a pack of young girls, tarted up for a night on the town, walking right past a line of shiftless men waiting patiently for a meal and a bed. If you start at this intersection and walk east, under the bridge of sighs that connects the... READ MORE»
On a weekday morning in Sunnyside, Queens, men and women emerge from brick houses and stolid apartment buildings to stream uphill toward the elevated No. 7 train, accompanied by bird song and with Dunkin Donuts coffee cups in their hands. But if they have a few extra minutes, they may turn aside into a Colombian panaderia, or bakery, like El Buen Sabor on Queens Boulevard. Under a faded red-and-white awning, El Buen Sabor’s windows... READ MORE»
