James Patrick
Posts by James Patrick
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Bruno Schultz was a Jewish writer in Germany during World War II, quite possibly the most dangerous time and place for a writer to live in through the 20th century,…
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Reflections: A Year in Reading (2011)
Tension City by Jim Lehrer Lehrer, formerly of the PBS program The News Hour, has penned one of the greatest books not only on debating, but on the rules of…
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Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
The thing that I admired most about Hitchens is the thing that irritated many people about him—he would not follow the party line.
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Censorship Just Shows Ignorance
Earlier this year, the American Library Association held their annual “Banned Books Week,” a well-meaning but inherently pointless demonstration that all over the country, and all around the world, people…
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NaNoWriMo: A Set of Jumper-Cables for Your Brain
An Open Letter: To Whom It May Concern: National Novel Writing Month has claimed my sanity. Starting on November 1, 2011, I will begin the insane task of trying to…
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The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
Known around the world for his creeping wit and aphoristic critical judgments, many forget
James Patrick
that the majority of Wilde’s writings can be described as tragedies.
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“Just Kids” by Patti Smith and “Patti Smith 1969-1976″ by Judy Linn
If Gone Again could be seen as a memorial for Fred Smith, then Just Kids is a memorial for Robert Mapplethorpe, the controversial photographer and media artist who was Smith’s first, lasting love affair.
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The Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester
Even though so many people can reference Alice off the top of their heads, very few seem to know anything about the history of Alice. Simon Winchester (author of The Professor and the Madman) has decided to delve into a less popular area of Carroll studies—the photographs of Lewis Carroll—focusing on one photograph in particular, of Alice Liddell.
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Hallucinating Foucault
Patricia Dunker’s 1996 debut novel is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting works of literary fiction from the end of the 20th century. A fictional representation of the…
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The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin
It would have been the title for Rush’s autobiography… Thank God Steve Martin got there first.
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