Search results for: roberta silman
Without Wendy
Almost furtively Bernie drops into his shopping cart: one red pepper, one yellow pepper, the smallest bunch of carrots he can find, four Yukon Golds, six, no seven, Brussels sprouts, a loaf of Berkshire Bakery sesame bread, one sinful brownie, and a pint of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, which he is determined to make …
Read MoreThe Swiveling Light of Truth
I can still remember, all these years later, the shiver of pleasure that ran through me when at the end of the 1950s I first read Grace Paley’s early stories. Hers was a voice so raucous, so appealing, that I felt as if someone had grabbed me by the lapels of my very proper …
Read MoreResponse to Our Autumn Issue
… overdue and echoes my sentiments exactly. I, too, have been discouraged to see such talented writers indulging themselves instead of working hard to find their own voices.
Roberta Silman
Ardsley, New York
The Bukiet piece on Brooklyn lit missed an opportunity, not because it wasn’t well done (it was, very), but because it wasn …
Declassified
… are as perceptive as they are demanding.
In corresponding with publishers and editors, he was direct and at times ruthless in defense of his interests, including with Robert Gottlieb, his editor at Knopf, whom he praised as “the greatest of them all.” A 2009 letter to Penguin, his new publisher, detailed his instructions on everything …
35 Over 35
… appear in her later works: social criticism, religious disillusionment, a complex love for the American South—and an exploration of the lives of strong, stubborn women.
9. Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink
It’s debatable when the enfant terrible of the Chilean literary world debuted—do we count a 1984 novel, never translated into English …
Swimming the River of Song
Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry by Robert Kanigel; Knopf, 352 pp., $27.95
In 1923, with the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties in full swing, a young man fresh out of college spent a summer on a Los Angeles beach reading Homer, in Greek. As legend …