LeBron had been a great high school basketball player in Akron and had skipped college to go to the NBA. But he had not yet played a single game, and yet there he was, reclined on a gold and red velvet throne, draped with a white fur cape, like the pelt of the endangered spotted snow leopard, resplendently bejeweled and sporting a glitzy sash of a vaguely bellicose nature. More…
At long last, we’ve gotten from Tiger what, according to nothing but the economy of grace, I think he owed us all along: a little bit of that other self, the one that can’t be bought or sold but only given. It’s not simply that we know certain sordid details of his preferred sexual perversions but also, for example, that he is perhaps more than a little lonely. More…
Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick is a great book to give as a gift to somebody you are hoping to sleep with. Explicit but subtle, its title contains two meanings, the first of which, despite appearances, is not aggressively sexual but in fact gentle and literary. And unlike flowers, which will die in a matter of days, I Love Dick can sit on a bookshelf for years, beguiling and suggestive. More…
Throughout his marathon campaign Barack Obama managed to manifest a number of moments of radical privacy that, it seemed, had nothing at all to do with escaping the glare of the spotlight, nothing at all to do with not being seen or heard or otherwise captured—something that would likely have been detrimental to his campaign, and surely impossible in any event. More…
At last, having compressed five hundred years or more into thirty minutes or less, Fuentes asked, “What will be the future of Latin American literature?” I opened my notebook and uncapped my pen, thinking that the lecture would only now begin in earnest; but to my surprise, it was already ending. “In the future,” Fuentes declared, “we must be inclusive, not exclusive.” That was that. More…
Francisco Umbral died as every writer should: in the midst of dictating his next newspaper column to his wife. Umbral, as it turns out, left behind over eighty published books. All the same, he is remembered at least as much for his womanizing and his notorious sexual appetite as he is for that vast body of work More…
Why did I get choked up at the end of a romantic comedy starring the two of them? Was I really that surprised that, despite the fact that they faced so many obstacles, they ended up together? Did I ever entertain the notion that they would not? And why did I know enough about the story for it to choke me up without hearing a word of it? Isn’t audio supposed to be an indispensable element in cinema? More…
Javier Marías’s books do not move forward, or in any event, they do not move forward very quickly, and when they do, the movement forward is not the movement that truly matters but rather the movement that marks a kind of compromise, a nod to convention and practical constraints. More…
