2022 Newsletters

2021 Newsletters

• December 28: “If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you.” (Rumi)
  
• December 21: Starting to Read a Book Is Like Going on a First Date
  
• December 14: The Magical Hands that Got THE ANOAMLY on the Best Seller Lists
  
• December 7: CLIMATES: The Mechanics of Love, 1928–2022
  
• November 30: What Does Swiss Writer Peter Stamm Have to Say About Vermont?
  
• November 23: How THE ANOMALY Made More Than a Million Readers Feel Almost Normal Again
  
• November 16: A Rap Song, a Prayer, a Poem, a Novel, for a Muslim Friend Who Is a Lesbian
  
• November 9: The Goncourt Prize: A Light in the Midst of Inglorious Times
  
• November 2: What Do Poetry and Cookbooks Have in Common?
  
• October 26: “The Experiment,” Peter Stamm’s Slightly Uncomfortable Short Story
  
• October 19: Lemon: A Korean Noir Written Without Touching a Metaphor
  
• October 12: What Does It Take to Write Like Faulkner, Yet with Hope, Justice, and Human Transformation as the Outcome?
  
• October 5: Tradition and Modernism: Which Is Which?
  
• September 28: From Cameroon: A Super-Smart, Funny, Sad, Queer, and Politically Provocative Comedy
  
• September 21: The State of Israel vs. the Jews
  
• September 14: A Time to Remember: The First Pan-African Cultural Festival
  
• September 7: How the Fall of the Ottoman Empire Reinvented Masculinity
  
• August 31: The Complicated World of Hanna Krall, or My First True Short-Story Collection in Translation
  
• August 24: Afghan Songs and Stories of Love and War
  
• August 17: What Makes a Good Historical Novel?
  
• August 10: How Frederick Douglass Taught Us to Read
  
• August 3: The Lebanese Conundrum: “Should I stay or should I go?”
  
• July 27: “To be understood is to prostitute oneself” —Fernando Pessoa
  
• July 20: Antonio Skármeta’s Heart on the Page Is Simply Irresistible
  
• July 13: When Neither Life Nor Literature Outside Politics Is Imaginable
  
• July 6: How Proust Unwittingly Figured Out Whiteness
  
• June 29: The Dire Consequences of Cursing Romaine Lettuce—and Music!
  
• June 22: The Mafia, Amore, and Other Dexterous Italian Inventions
  
• June 15: Hospitality, by Ben Okri
  
• June 8: Ben Okri on the Metaphysics of Misunderstanding
  
• June 1: Rupert Thomson’s Novels Can’t Be Spoken of—It’s All in the Writing
• May 25: The Lessons of History Woven into a Noir with a Special Heart
• May 18: When Denial Turns into Erasure, All Hell Breaks Loose
• May 11: Surprising, Insightful, Charming, and Tragic, All on the Hills and Beaches of the Amalfi Coast
• May 4: The Souls of Translators Are Mirrored in the Words They Choose
• April 27: Is Madame Bovary Still With Us?
• April 20: There Is a Land Where Artists Go Before They Are Born or After They Die
• April 13: John Boyne, at His Most Counterintuitive and Literary
• April 6: To Watch Or Read—Or Can We Do Both?
• March 30: As Promised, An Unpublished Short Story By Fabio Morábito!
• March 23: You Don’t Need to Know How to Read to Love Poetry
• March 16: Time for Culture to Return to Where It Came From
• March 9: Outline of a Lecture for a Hypothetical Conference of Divorcees
• March 2: Kamel Daoud Finds His Own Version of “Orientalism” on the Western Front
• February 23: When Ebola Spoke We Didn’t Listen
• February 16: Black History Month? Nothing But Serious Homework
• February 9: The Stuff That Makes Resilience Isn’t Character But Impertinence
• February 2: The Joy of Finding Oneself Through the Meanderings of Family History
• January 26: When Jewish Intellectuals Sat Begrudgingly on the Beach in Santa Monica in Their Three-Piece Suits
• January 19: Prehistoric Women Had It Down and Their Guys Listened
• January 12: Our Best Books of Last Year Match the Sorrow and Yearnings of 2020
• January 5: Taking in the Pain of Migrants Isn’t Within the Range of Our Mental Zones

2020 Newsletters

• December 22: Chick-lit, Dada, and Math Ad Infinitum
• December 15: It Isn’t Easy to Do the Right Thing
• December 8: The Wonderful Synergy Between History and Literature
• December 1: Only Literature Can Solve Italy’s Paradoxes
• November 24: We Don’t Know What We Are Saying When We Talk
• November 17: Understated, Eccentric, and as Intimate as an English Novel Allows
• November 10: When We Lose Our Mind, Our Body Usually Finds It
• November 2: God, the War of the Poor, and Tomorrow
• October 27: The Wisdom of Jewish Jokes in Moments of Danger
• October 20: The Iliad: Our Bittersweet Home
• October 13: Israel’s False Consciousness
• October 6: Post-Nazism Should Be a Reminder of Its Sneaky Onset
• September 29: The Prophetic, Intimate Revelations of Issac J. Bailey
• September 22: Love Is Overrated
• September 15: A Muslim Sex Worker Brings Prejudices to Their Knees
• September 8: Erotic, Violent, And Deeply Unconventional
• September 1: Biographies of Emigrant Writers Traveling Far Away or Deep Within
• August 25: Let’s Start Our Revolution With Natural Wines, Purple Tomatoes, and One-Day-Old Eggs
• August 18: The Joy of Translating Women Writers from Around the World
• August 11: Simply Peter Stamm
• August 4: Verstehen: From the Mind to the Heart and Back
• July 28: Vienna, Berlin, and Portland
• July 21: A Thriller Like No Other
• July 14: Goncourt Prize: Bastille Day or Trumpland?
• July 7: Three Women Writing Novels About Age, Class, and Political Oppression
• June 30: Two Insightful French Thrillers on the Wrongs of Our Society
• June 23: Defunding the Police with Machiavelli
• June 16: Then and Now, Not Really a Return of the Repressed
• June 9: Social Distancing Has Finally Brought WE to American History
• June 2: Forbidden Passion
• May 26: Fierce and Fragile
• May 19: The Heart of the Matter
• May 12: Thrillers East and West
• May 5: Dangerous Intuitions
• April 28: The Power of Art, Their Makers, Their Lovers and Their Viewers
• April 21: Thrilling Novels from Brilliant Scandinavian Women Writers
• April 14: Thinking with a Smile
• April 7: Stay Home and READ