Longreads

‘Useless Landscape,’ by D.A. Powell — reviewed by Sara Marcus (San Francisco Chronicle): Magnificently, Powell holds in one hand the natural world, the built environment and the…

Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric (Boston Review), by Marjorie Perloff Perloff’s critique of contemporary American poetry and praise for the Conceptual poets is worth a read if only…

CÉSAR VALLEJO 1892-1938 BLACK STONE OVER A WHITE STONE (Translation by Andres Rojas) I will die in Paris in a rainstorm, on a day I already remember. I will die in Paris – by this I stand…

1. “THE CASE IS CLOSED” “For general use the single-tone [black-and-white] pictures will enormously prevail." — Rupert Hughes, screenwriter, 1923 “[Sound film] is an…

Great #longreads from the New York Times, 24 Minutes, and the Guardian. By Mark Armstrong on Fri. July 29, 2011 5:17 PM PDT Mother Jones guest blogger Mark Armstrong is the founder of…

To the writing of his detective stories Raymond Chandler brings the experience and the skepticism of a newspaper reporter, the narrative gifts of a born storyteller, and a mastery of pungent American dialogue. His leading character, Philip Marlowe, is a professional detective who has held the spotlight thus far in four novels, all of which have been purchased by the movies. One of them, The Big Sleep, in which Lauren Bacall plays the lead, is soon to be released. In his screenplays as in his books, Mr. Chandler has scored a personal success, but he has done so without losing sight of the difficulties encountered by the creative writer in the studios. For this is the anomaly: the producers pay their authors large fees apparently for the purpose of disregarding their advice and their text.

Essay by Marcelo Ballv I. In 1921, a well-to-do Argentine family arrived in Buenos Aires on a grand transatlantic ship, the Reina Victoria Eugenia. If they were on deck to watch the city…

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. Baka malamig doon were among the few words she said. (It…

Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos. All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel 'Histoire d’O,' the full truth was finally made public.