Category: Book of the Week

September 25, 2012

Daniel Herwitz on What Makes Heritage Worth Talking About

“Through heritage, marketed in political campaigns and filtered through dense layers of American media both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin become celebrity figures gifted with special powers.”—Daniel Herwitz In this first part of a two-part interview, Daniel Herwitz discusses one...

September 21, 2012

Victor Navasky to Discuss The Art of Making Magazines at the Brooklyn Book Festival

This week we’ve been featuring The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry and this Sunday, you can hear Victor Navasky talk more about the book at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Navasky will...

September 20, 2012

Robert Gottlieb on Editing at Knopf Versus The New Yorker

“When you’re the editor-in-chief of a magazine, as I was of The New Yorker … You are the living god.”—Robert Gottlieb, “Editing Books Versus Editing Magazines” In his essay, “Editing Books Versus Editing Magazines,” from The Art of Making Magazines:...

September 19, 2012

Victor Navasky and Evan Cornog on the Art of Making Magazines

The following is an interview with Victor S. Navasky and Evan Cornog, editors of The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry. As the subtitles suggests, The Art of Making Magazines features the...

September 18, 2012

Michael Kelly on Writing for Playboy and What It Taught Him about Magazines

“Any magazine is, in the end, what a very small, self-selected group of people—its readers—wants it to be. And the magazine is shaped to that.”—Michael Kelly, “Editing a Thought-Leader Magazine” The following is an excerpt from Michael Kelly’s essay in...

September 14, 2012

Judith Jack Halberstam on the University, Credos, and More

“I believe in shaking down the big disciplines once a generation, replacing dinosaur forms of knowledge production with improvised programs, and reinventing curricula, disciplinary knowledge, and knowledge clusters every decade at least. I believe … the university needs to dance...

September 13, 2012

Mark Greif on the Challenges of Contemporary Criticism

Mark Greif is the cofounder and a current editor at n+1 and an assistant professor at the New School. In the following excerpt from his essay, “All There is to Use,” published in The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary...

September 12, 2012

Stephen Burt on the Impossibility of Poetry Criticism via The Critical Pulse

“But poetry criticism should also be impossible: if a poem is any good it should exceed and complicate any statement that you want to make about it—the trick is to say things that are true nevertheless.”—Stephen Burt, “Without Evidence” One...

September 11, 2012

Jeffrey J. Williams and Heather Steffen on "The Critical Pulse" and Literary Criticism

The following is an interview with Jeffrey J. Williams and Heather Steffen, coeditors of The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics. (For more on the book, you can read the introduction, Criticism in a Difficult Time). Question: What is...

August 31, 2012

Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender

Judith Butler explains how your behavior creates your gender.

August 30, 2012

Judith Butler on deriving principles from a Jewish cultural tradition

Judith Butler explains “what it means to derive a set of principles from a cultural tradition” and then applies this explanation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

August 29, 2012

Judith Butler on being Jewish and criticizing Israel

Judith Butler rebuts criticisms of her position on Israeli politics, Hamas and Hezbollah, and BDS.