For the Atlantic’s By Heart series, I’ve written an essay about memorizing and re-memorizing W. H. Auden’s poem “In Praise of Limestone.”
Reliefs on Kaprova Street
A photograph from 1990 or 1991 of reliefs by Richard Luksch on the façade of a building on Kaprova Street in Prague.
If this image were included in an extra-illustrated binding of the novel Necessary Errors, the binder could position it pretty much anywhere. (For an explanation of extra-illustration, click here.)
“Necessary Errors,” the book trailer
Penguin invited Brian Spinks, the co-creator of Wired magazine’s Codefellas series, to devise an animated book trailer for Necessary Errors. I think it’s kind of ingenious.
Tonight (Monday) at 7pm, I’ll be reading from the novel and having a conversation about it with Paris Review editor Lorin Stein at McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince St., New York. Please come by!
A review in the daily New York Times
In this morning’s daily New York Times, David Haglund has written a generous, perceptive, funny review of my novel Necessary Errors. His review begins with a riff on this classic, all-too-pertinent scene from Kicking and Screaming.
The NYTBR, Kirkus, and Slate
There’s a somewhat mixed review of my novel in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Aaron Hamburger writes that he wishes there were more of a plot and that I had written explicit sex scenes. He praises the “lovely, sure-handed prose,” however.
Over all, I’ve been tremendously fortunate in the critical reception of the book so far, in its quantity and its tone, and I remain very grateful for it.
For example, also today, Kirkus has published an interview with me by Jaime Netzer, who has done a very artful job of letting me ramble on while somehow pulling together a story about the role that the critical impulse plays in the writing of a novel.
And in Slate, Jane Hu has written a generous and thoughtful essay that looks into, among other things, the novel’s debt to Auden, its lack of a conventional plot, and the question of its relation to postmodernism.