PolyArchive

Review: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life George Saunders Random House ISBN 9781984856029 PRICE $28.00 (USD) PAGES 432 George Saunders, the celebrated author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December, invites readers on an intellectual journey with his […]

Olga Khazan | The Atlantic: We Expect Too Much From Our Romantic Partners. A new book explores how marriage has changed in recent years, and why that’s made staying married harder. Stuart Firestein | Nautilus: How Pseudoscientists Get Away With It. “They imitate the ways in which science works and make claims as if they […]

I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life […]

…Among those “enemies” prosecuted as a parasite was Joseph Brodsky, a young poet and future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, he was considered among “the most politically unreliable” people, because he  “was part of a circle of anti-Soviet individuals” and “wrote poems of a decadent and even hostile nature” instead of engaging in activities that […]

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look […]

The Infinite Sky There’s a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown says, “I’ve watched this movie twenty times, and Shane never comes back.” I feel the same way about Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in War and Peace. Recently, I did a freelance project (a Cliff Notes type thing) for W&P, and so I read it for […]

Italo Calvino’s Definition: What Makes a Book a “Classic”? The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading…” We use the words “classics” for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those […]