Eli S. Evans: Is That It

From Granta: Never return to the places where you’ve been happy, my father always said. Ever since I started writing fiction, I’ve crafted not-always-happy stories about the country of my overwhelmingly happy childhood. It was no Utopia, of course, especially in the economic scramble after the fall of Soviet...

Narita International Airport: Various Curious Scenes of Airplanes, Yamaguchi Akira, 2005 From London Review of Books: While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North...

by Jason Dittmer The Middle of the Map: Geopolitics of Perceptions, by Attila Marján, John Harper Publishing, 208 pp. Attila Marján’s The Middle of the Map is a book that defies easy characterization. From its cover photo by Deep Purple’s Roger Glover to…well, really the cover photo by Roger Glover...

The Death and Life of Great New York Novels | by Tom LeClair

Barnes and Noble Review

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of The Death and Life of Great American Cities  , Jane Jacobs's groundbreaking and ground-revealing book that still influences...

From Boston Review: Ships as far as the eye can see. The rising sun glittering on the Aegean. Wind rippling the sails, water lapping the bows, fear, excitement, vengeance, glory, the favor of the gods, the order contemplated, the order given. Or, expressed differently: Since obviously under any analysis...

From The American Prospect: Around 1950, Americans began to see signs of a new kind of discontent. A generation of young rebels started popping up in fiction and films — Holden Caulfield, the characters played by Marlon Brando and James Dean — who were fleeing from or revolting against...

by Martin Paul Eve The two, alternate titles proposed for my recent work are “The F Word” and “Whose Line is it Anyway?” The word in question is Foucault, as in Michel, and the “Line” is Pynchon’s, as in Mason & Dixon. The cursory glances that have been afforded...

  Bezirk Tempelhof-Schöneberg, Berlin by Peter Fritzsche When I first found the sprawling diary in a Berlin archive, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.  It was full of insight, but littered with self-pity.  Political reportage on the terrible drama of twentieth-century German history often yielded to inflexible...

Murakami is able to connect to his audiences, as well as allowing them connect to different worlds...