Book Think

I’ve read nothing more heartwarming recently than the excerpts from young Obama’s love letters in the new Vanity Fair. The glow they exude has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with nostalgia. They’re so post-collegiate, they almost reek of ramen. Full of curiosity and self-absorption ... Read More

The copyright on Mein Kampf, Hitler’s infamous 700-page anti-Semitic rant, is scheduled to expire in 2015. Fearing an onslaught of neo-Nazi editions, the Bavarian state has decided to reprint the book in Germany for the first time since World War II, in a scholarly version they hope will be viewed ... Read More

With bookstores vanishing, the Pulitzer committee skimping on Pulitzers, and the Amazon dragon twining its bright yellow coils around every publisher on Earth, the book industry finds itself in dire peril. But lo! What figure rides over the horizon? Is it...could it be... St. George? Yes ... Read More

It’s a wonderful oddity—I hesitate to say “coincidence”—that the best erotic poem in literary history should appear smack dab in the middle of the Bible. The Song of Songs (known also as the Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles) is an ancient Hebrew text of uncertain date; some scholars trace ... Read More

Google's "augmented reality" glasses are upon us, complete with stylish company codename ("Project Glass") and Orwellian rhetorical judo: "People I have spoken with [i.e., Google employees] who have have seen Project Glass said there is a misconception that the glasses will interfere with people ... Read More

I can still vividly remember reading, back in 2001, the New York Times Magazine write-up on the release of The Corrections. It began:  Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. He did so in a spartan studio on 125th Street in East Harlem, behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned ... Read More

A Q&A With Christian Wiman, Translator of Stolen Air When Osip Mandelstam died at age 47 in a Siberian work camp under the Stalin regime, he became one of twentieth-century poetry's most famous martyrs. Vastly talented and fearlessly subversive, he is perhaps best remembered for his scathing ... Read More

“It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to ... Read More

Dear Readers, For the weekend, a few miscellaneous notes: If there's ever a book you'd like to see covered on Book Think, please feel free to drop me a note in the comments. Suggestions regarding "classic" works (whatever you take that to mean) or overlooked older books are especially ... Read More

You already know where you stand on Holden Caulfield. Either you found him a kindred spirit in your youth and continue to sympathize with him—less blindly, more wistfully—as you age; or else you found him a whiner then and you find him a whiner now. According to the New York Times, the second ... Read More

Working at Big Think was a constant kick in the pants of my imagination. As a writer, I couldn’t have asked for a job that provided more and stranger ideas to play with. This was true across all the fields the site covers, but particularly so in the sciences. I’ll never forget listening to ... Read More

It’s February 15th, and while some readers may have woken up this morning in a haze of romantic bliss, others will have spent the day asking their pets where it all went wrong.  This poem is for the second group. It first appeared in an earlier version in the December 2011 issue of The New Guard ... Read More

Reading last week about the death of Florence Green, Women's Royal Air Force member and last surviving veteran of the First World War, I thought of a sonorous passage by Borges: In a stable lying almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and a gray beard, stretched on ... Read More

Anne Carson writes books that refuse to be just one thing. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel framed as a work of classical scholarship; fittingly, its hero is a hybrid, part ancient monster and part modern man. The Beauty of the Husband, subtitled “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos,” is actually a ... Read More

Once in a great while, I write something that's too long to fit comfortably in a blog post. This week one of those pieces, an essay on the notorious and beloved British poet Philip Larkin, is up over at Open Letters Monthly. Larkin is a writer I find continually fascinating: a major poet who ... Read More