Richard Ford recently gave Newsweek a list of the five books he could not live without and one that he definitely could. Here’s the classics that made his list:
The NY Times ran an interesting piece on the changes Newsweek is making to stay alive. The weekly, never known for its depth and insight, is looking for deeper intellectual water:
The new Newsweek will no longer attempt to re-report and annotate the week’s events — an expensive, unsustainable approach to making a weekly news magazine…. Instead, the reimagined magazine will include reported narratives that rely on intellectual scoops rather than informational ones and pair them with essayistic arguments.
That sounds far more interesting, if not as lucrative, than Newsweek’s vanilla past. And chasing deep readers beats the alternative for print publications in the age of RSS feeds, News Aggregators and Social Media Networks — something the Times may want to remember as it experiments with ways to stop its own revenue declines.
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series)
Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2009
If fundamentalism is as Terry Eagleton claims a “failure of the imagination,” Reason, Faith, and Revolution is his attempt to show how religion’s liberal opponents and their ultra-rationalist arguments have suffered the same intellectual failures as those that they [...]
Today the Avenues of A, B and C are full of sushi restaurants, cafes and bars that serve martinis for double digit prices. It is a far cry from the place that Miguel Algarin grew up in and remained in. The neighborhood still has its charm that separates it completely from the rest of the [...]
In The Accordionist’s Son, Bernardo Atxaga brings the horrors of recent history to light without diminishing the mysteriously foreign and beautiful world that he has created. And it is another world that Atxaga has created, so particular in the details of both the land and its inhabitants that it feels organic like few fictional worlds [...]
Nick Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone-Away World, brings magical realism to the post apocalyptic genre. A well written vision for futurists and luddites alike.
In the The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel Salman Rushdie continues to explore his interest in how the supernatural can be brought to life through the power of storytelling. However, he does so without the grandiosely experimental postmodernism of his earlier works.
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