Day: September 5, 2005

Richard Ford and the Failure of Words

Words fail me after reading Richard Ford’s A City Beyond the Reach of Empathy in the New York Times. Well, here are some words that seem to work, taken directly from Ford’s piece: ‘wrenching’, ‘pointless’, ‘aching’, ‘painful’.

Richard Ford, if you haven’t read his books, is an ultra-dry postmodernist, an … Read the rest

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Reviewing the Review: Sept 4 2005

All complaints aside, the New York Times really is pretty good to books. Philip Roth leans on a fence post on the cover of the Arts And Leisure section (the article is about his increasing canonization, as evidenced by the Library of America’s new publication of his collected works). Novelists … Read the rest

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