In Defense of Difficult Books
Difficulty is not a tax the reader pays; sometimes it is the content itself. Against the frictionless book, and the review culture that demands it.
Category: Essays
Longer pieces: arguments, appreciations, and attempts.
Letters I Never Sent
A shoebox of unsent letters, 1991 to 2009. On the strange genre of the letter written to be finished rather than mailed.
Second-Hand Inscriptions
For Margaret, Christmas 1974 — who was Margaret, and why did she give the book away? An essay on the messages that outlive their occasions.
Walking as Punctuation
A sentence needs commas and a day needs walks. On the ambulatory semicolon: the walk that joins two unrelated thoughts and makes them a paragraph.
Translation and Its Discontents
Two translations of the same Russian sentence sit on my desk, and they do not agree about the weather. On the impossible, necessary art.
On Reading Slowly
Speed was never the point. A defense of the fifteen-page evening, the paragraph read twice, and the book that takes a season.
What the Library Knew
The card catalog at the Rochambeau branch knew things about my neighborhood that no database has learned since.
Against the Infinite Scroll
The feed has no last page, and that is the whole design. On endings as a form of respect, and why I want my reading to run out.
The Bookstore at Closing Time
Eleven years of turning the sign to CLOSED. What a used bookstore sounds like in its last half hour, and what the register tape never recorded.
Why I Still Write in the Margins
A pencil, a paperback, and the argument for talking back to books. On the long conversation a reader carries on in the white space at the edge of the page.