My review of Eva Figes' Journey To Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land is in the Telegraph today. The review begins: Eva Figes wrote Journey to Nowhere as a grandmother. Her head was "full of stories about the past" that were forced to the surface by the impertinent questions of her grandchildren, whose function, she suggests, is to draw such forgotten, forbidden tales into the light.So,...

The Lost Book Club is a "very elegant and slick site [...] supposed to be the 'home to any and all literary references made on the show — from Stephen King to Kurt Vonnegut.' (Or Adolfo Bioy Casares to Vladimir Nabokov.)" Via Three Percent....

Doug Henwood reviews Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Shock Doctrine is organized around a conceit: "shock" and its cousin "disaster" explain the political economy of the last several decades. One ur-figure is Dr. Ewen Cameron, a ghoulish psychiatrist who worked under contract with the CIA during the 1950s, devising methods to extract information and remake personalities through the use of dru...

Flannery O'Connor: I am often asked if universities stifle writers. My view is that they don't stifle enough of them....

Apropos the publication of his play Conversation in the Mountains (which Pierre Joris described here on RSB as "absolute awful drivel"), TEV asks John Banville "What first inspired you to write about the meeting between Celan and Heidegger?" Well, I've always been fascinated by the thought of these two extraordinary figures encountering each other—the philosopher who had been a Nazi, the poet wh...