Michael Chabon

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

‘Ulysses’ on Trial

The target was United States anti-obscenity law. The bait was a single copy of an English-language novel, the most notorious book in the world.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Soul Pleasure

The Crying of September 11

Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Bleeding Edge’

Let It Rock

The Film Worlds of Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson’s Worlds

From Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom (shamefully neglected by this year’s Academy voters), Wes Anderson’s films readily, even eagerly, concede the “miniature” quality of the worlds he builds.

Head or Tale

On the Vico Road

What to Make of Finnegans Wake?

Why I Hate Dreams

I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.

On ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’

On 'The Phantom Tollbooth'

When I was a boy I read, in a biography of Daniel Boone, or of Daniel Beard, that young Dan (whichever of the two it may have been—or maybe it was young George Washington) had so loved some book, had felt his heart and mind inscribed so deeply in its every line, that he had pricked his fingertip with a knife and, using a pen nib and his blood for ink, penned his name on the flyleaf. At once, reading that, I knew two things: 1) I must at once undertake the same procedure and 2) only one, among all the books I adored and treasured, was worthy of such tribute: *The Phantom Tollbooth*. At that point I had read it at least five or six times.

Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood

Obama & the Conquest of Denver

In Priceland

After the Apocalypse

After Strange Gods

On ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’