For the past quarter century or so, Deborah Eisenberg has been writing such perfect, satisfying, yet un-expectedly disturbing short stories that you would have had to be out of your mind to ask her for a novel. It's been quite clear from the work she has already given us that she's capable of saying

in print

Apr/May 2010 Contents

Ana Marie Cox on Emily Gould's And the Heart Says Whatever
Clay Risen on Daniel S. Pierce's Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France and Mark Bechtel's He Crashed Me so I Crashed Him Back
Wendy Lesser on Deborah Eisenberg's Collected Stories
Dahlia Lithwick on Paul D. Halliday's Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire

Omnivore

The way things are

A carefully crafted f@&% you: An interview with Judith Butler, the gender-theorist-turned-philosopher-of-nonviolence, on the choices that make people expendable, and the role grief can play in setting a new course. No jacket required: A review of The Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. Michael F Suarez SJ and Henry Woudhuysen; The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future by Robert Darnton; Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books by Margaret Willes; and The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree. The way things are and how they might be: An interview with Tony Judt. A manifesto for a new politics As a culmination of his political thinking, Tony Judt, paralysed by motor neurone disease, makes an impassioned

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Paper Trail

Mar 22 2010

Apparently, penning manifestos is terribly fatiguing. David Shields recently dismissed novelist Myla Goldberg’s forthcoming novel, The False Friend, based solely on a short catalog description. "No offense to her; I haven’t read her work." When pressed by interviewer Edward Champion, Shields explained, “I’ve read enough of her other book. I’ve flipped pages. . . . I was like,